Brian Knep : Journal
Natalie and BZ Cocktails
Been chatting with Natalie Andrew, a relatively new postdoc in Jeremy Gunawardena’s lab. Her bench (lab space) is down the hall from my frog room, and she’s been studying Dictyostelium, a type of Slime Mould. They are amazing one-celled organisms that group together when starving to form a slug. This slug crawls to a new place and forms fruiting bodies which disperse the mould. Very cool, but this entry is about BZ Cocktails.
No alcohol required, ordered from a high-school lab supply house, the BZ Cocktail is a set of chemicals that, when mixed together in the right concentrations, form a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. This is a classic reaction-diffusion reaction, like I use in much of my work (e.g., the Healing Series).
Natalie and Prabhakaran Sudhakaran, another postdoc in the lab, got a BZ Cocktail Kit and have been playing with it. She excitedly brought the chemicals into my room and mixed them up in a test tube.
First you mix…
Then you get Green…
Then you get Red…
And it keeps alternating between. Boring huh, but kind of cool when you think about it. The instructions say that it will oscillate back and forth 20 times, although we didn’t count.
Stay tuned for more exciting things from BZ, including spiral waves!
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(a) not a slime mold - it’s a social amoeba. slime mold is a horrible inaccurate and ambiguous term we’re trying to live down - it also describes the extraordinary (and completely different) Physarum…
(b) do you know the history of the BZ reaction? Belousov couldn’t get it published anywhere because his peers claimed it was thermodynamically impossible; he was driven out of science. An interesting thing to reflect on in these troubled times
Robert
Cripes, you’d think any self-respecting scientist would at least have the decency to wear a lab coat and goggles!
Robert behave! You can hardly blame him when the wiki says slime mould and dictybase hardly mentions any socialising. I take full responsibility for being a bad educator, many apologies Brian but Dicty is indeed a social amoeba. It likes a good joke and will buy you a pint without prompting.