Drunk earthworm to win Ig Nobel Prize

The 34^Number The 1st Ig Nobel Prize The 10 awards were announced on September 12, 2024. They are known for highlighting “research that makes people laugh and think.” Plants that mimic plastic To Mammalian anal breathing.^1,2

Daniel Bonphysicist, and Sander WoutersenThe physical chemist and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam won the chemistry prize for racing drunk and sober earthworms in a chromatography maze. Sort To better understand the dynamics of polymers, we observe their undulating movements.³ “We’re so excited,” Vonn said, “we just couldn’t keep quiet about it.”

Much of Bonn’s work embraces the Ig Nobel spirit, and he has previously The perfect sandcastle And why Quicksand The victim cannot be completely submerged.^4,5 Recently, active polymers, which have the ability to move on their own and play biological roles in cell membrane structure and sperm motility, have attracted his attention. Because active polymers are difficult to create and observe due to their tiny size, Bon has found a unique macroscopic model. Thin, watery Tubifex worm Worms, whose segmented bodies resemble polymers made of repeating units and, most importantly, exhibit active movement, led Bon and his colleagues to investigate the physical properties of these dynamic, polymer-like worms.

Chemists and other life science researchers often use pillar array chromatography to separate molecules through a maze of pillars. For example, this chromatography can separate DNA strands or polymers of different lengths based on the time each takes to pass through the column. Woutersen came up with a unique use for this tool.

I think the biggest takeaway from this experiment, at least for me, is that sometimes when a drunk bug is wrapped around a lamppost and a sober bug walks by, the drunk bug gets taken along with it.
– Daniel Bonn, University of Amsterdam

“The idea was that we could classify the worms based on their length,” Woutersen says. “Longer worms are more likely to get stuck on the pole, and they’re the same length, so we could classify them by activity.” They needed to catch the inactive worms. At first, they had the sinister idea of ​​euthanizing the worms, but the team came up with a more humane method: anesthetizing the worms with anesthesia. alcohol.⁶

Instead of taking the worms to a tavern, the researchers made them temporarily intoxicated by placing them in a 3-5 percent ethanol solution that also contained a small amount of methylene blue dye. “This worked beautifully. [the worms] “They become completely intoxicated,” Woutersen said, “but when they are put back into the water, they regain their energy and sober up within 20 minutes, without headache or other problems.”

To compare activity, the team placed the reddish, natural sober worms and the blue, drunk worms in a maze (a hexagonal test tube with distilled water running down its length) and measured the time the worms spent in the maze. Woutersen predicted that the drunk worms would exit the maze faster because they would “go with the flow,” while the more active worms would get stuck along the pillars. To their surprise, the drunk worms were less active, while the sober worms tended to curl up and knot their bodies together, which helped them to slip between the pillars. Within a few minutes, it was clear that the sober worms were more easily and quickly traversing the maze to reach the finish line.

“But the sad thing is that drunk earthworms get home very late,” Woutersen says. Bon likens the process to the afterglow of a wild night at a bar, where drunk people hang on to street lamps, saying, “Our mazes are actually little pillars, and the drunk earthworms wrap themselves around the pillars and can’t get home.”

This work answers some questions but also raises new ones about using these wriggling bugs as a model for studying the isolation of active polymers, one that resonates with the human perspective.

“I think the biggest lesson from this experiment, at least for me, is that if a drunk bug is wrapped around a lamppost and a sober bug walks past, it might take the drunk bug with it. So the moral of the story is if you’re going to the pub, someone needs to be sober to take everyone home,” Bon said.