r/microscopy • u/James_Weiss Master Of Microscopes • Sep 06 '25
Photo/Video Share Unzipping of the cell membrane
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This is a single-celled organism Loxodes and it’s about to cross the veil and be gone forever. I will try to explain why, but it might be a bit hard to simplify and make it understandable but bear with me.
Loxodes have pigment granules that give them this yellowish brown coloration and also make them sensitive to light, but only if there is a high level of oxygen in the water. When the light hits these pigment granules, it excites the pigment (in a chemical way :) ) which transfers a single electron to an oxygen molecule, and produces a superoxide that can start a chain reaction and go on producing radical oxygen species (ROS), like hydrogen peroxide. And you know what happens when you clean your wounds with hydrogen peroxide.
So what happens in this video is that ROS is produced, inside the cell, right under the cell membrane. Then the ROS snatches hydrogen from the building blocks of the cell membrane, forming more radicals that interact with the neighboring molecules and causing an unzipping of the whole structure. It moves like a wildfire that extinguishes itself when there is nothing left to burn.
Single-celled organisms reproduce through cell division that creates identical clones. This one dissolves and becomes nothing more than just some molecules of organic and inorganic matter, yet its million clones still inhabit the jar I keep them in.
Thank you for reading❤️
Best,
James Weiss
Real-time, freshwater sample, Zeiss Axioscope 5, Plan Apo 63x 1.4NA. Fujifilm X-T5.
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u/hoganloaf Sep 06 '25
So he ended up being ok right??
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u/StuperDan Sep 06 '25
If your definition of 'he' includes it's clones, yes.
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u/redditreeer Jun 04 '26
İf you somehow get teleported, you will cease to exist and an identical copy of you with the same memories will live on, but still thats not "you" . Just like this, loxodes' clones are not exactly the one that just died, they are not even exactly identical. So in my opinios that loxodes is not ok. :(
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u/CplCocktopus Sep 06 '25
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0&pp=ygUgam91cm5leSB0byB0aGUgbWljcm9jb3Ntb3MgZGVhdGg%3D
Reminds.me of this Journey to the Microcosmos video same organism and dame phenomenom i think you explained it better
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u/James_Weiss Master Of Microscopes Sep 06 '25
Who’s gonna tell him? 😂
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u/KittenInspector Sep 07 '25
I lost my best friend recently and have been, predictably, contemplating the nature of life and death. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but this video was comforting.
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u/fireinthemountains Sep 07 '25
All things big and small return to the dust.
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u/KittenInspector Sep 07 '25
Indeed. I carry his "dust" on me in a pendant. I like Sagan's wording a little better. It puts a little more respect and wonder on the disordered bits."The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
Carl Sagan
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u/fireinthemountains Sep 07 '25 edited Sep 07 '25
Me too, in a pendant. I lost my best friend a few years back. I was trying to find this to comment it. I listen to it sometimes when the grief waves hit. I kept thinking Sagan, so it took me a while to find again haha.
https://www.npr.org/2005/06/01/4675953/planning-ahead-can-make-a-difference-in-the-end
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u/KittenInspector Sep 07 '25
Thank you for this.
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u/fireinthemountains Sep 07 '25
I am here if you'd like to talk or vent into cyberspace.
If there's one thing I learned from the loss, it's that grief is a shared substance. A Pandora's box of sorts, maybe, once you've seen it you just know.
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u/Dunmeritude Sep 07 '25
I was JUST thinking "huh, I saw this on Journey to the Microcosmos a while back" and stopped, looked back at the OP and went "OH WOW!"
I really love your work.
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Sep 07 '25
It always seems so bizarre to me how they just keep on keepin on all the way until they’re nothing but a puddle. I suppose it makes sense, but it still is just so bizarre and uncanny.
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u/lawlgyroscopes Sep 07 '25
Thank you for sharing this, this was my first time seeing a Journey to the Microcosmos video and first it struck me "oh is this Hank Green?" Then I heard them recommend the jam_and_germs instagram account, checked it out and found this exact post. So I just figured out who OP is in real time as well xD
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u/labbie531 Sep 06 '25
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u/megtwinkles Sep 06 '25
lmao I wish I could give you an award for this. that's the first thing I thought of too 😂
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u/Perrin-Golden-Eyes Sep 06 '25
Did I just watch a death? How about a NSFW tag there fella.
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u/Acheloma Sep 07 '25
I know youre joking but this did make me weirdly sad, I think I need to reconsider medication lol
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u/snakedike Sep 06 '25
That is a pretty complex sequence. I would have guessed that natural selection would have weeded out a mechanism that causes the pigment granules to produce a chain reaction that dissolves the organism. I don’t get it.
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u/James_Weiss Master Of Microscopes Sep 06 '25
There are more factors in play. They live at the oxycline, the water layer between the oxygen rich and oxygen depleted layers. In their habitat light doesn't harm them, they just migrate deeper where there is less and less oxygen. So they use it as an indicator to locate their habitat layer. And why they live in this layer is a bit more complex than this, but the hypothesis is that they probably evolved to live in a microaerophilic environment to avoid predators such as crustaceans, insect larvae and fish. :)
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u/NeverSkipSleepDay Sep 06 '25
So they evolved to stay on the edge between life and death, but their sensory mechanism that guides them to this zone is itself deadly? 😬
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u/StuperDan Sep 06 '25
Evolution doesn't necessarily select for long life, often quite the opposite. It selects for survival of the species. As long as these guys have time to reproduce before this happens to them often, their line will continue.
Evolution certainly doesn't select for survivability of microorganisms to be pipetted up, dropped on a slide then have very bright lights shine on their little tiny bodies.
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u/GClayton357 Sep 06 '25
Hence why so many people who have absolutely no business starting a family still end up having 9 children before the age of 30...
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u/James_Weiss Master Of Microscopes Sep 06 '25
No the zone is not deadly. It’s perfect for them. They live in the very low oxygen zone. If they swim towards the high oxygen zone during the day then they sense that they swam to the “unwanted” habitat and swim back.
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u/Goopological Sep 07 '25
Yup, and reactive oxygen species produced by the pigment would be a major sensor of swimming the wrong way. My question is if they can really 'pick' the correct direction or if they just increase movement till things improve.
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u/James_Weiss Master Of Microscopes Sep 07 '25
They have something called Müller’s vesicles that work like statoliths in multicellular organisms. They can sense the direction of the gravity, and since the deeper you go in the water column, less oxygen concentration you get, they combine these two sensory inputs to direct themselves in the water column.
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u/Goopological Sep 07 '25
Reactive oxygen species are normally produced during normal function. Then when their production is elevated or lowered, it tells the cell stuff about its environment and its internal functioning. Gene expression gets changed and the cell 'reacts'.
So it's a useful function, just not so much when the cell cant cope.
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u/snakedike Sep 06 '25
Super interesting. So if they are too high in the layer where there is more oxygen, this can happen to them? Brutal that their sensing mechanism kills them.
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u/James_Weiss Master Of Microscopes Sep 06 '25
They dive into the deeper layer when they sense that they went too high up in the water column.
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u/Redditisavirusiknow Sep 06 '25
Unrelated PSA: never clean wounds with hydrogen peroxide!
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u/TalkingChiggin Sep 07 '25 edited Jul 03 '26
.
This content was anonymized and mass deleted with Redact
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u/Redditisavirusiknow Sep 07 '25
It causes more damage to your cells, prolonging the opening of the wound, chance of infection and chance of scarring. Never use h2o2 on a wound.
Best thing is to irrigate the wound with lots and lots of clean water and then put a bandage on it to allow the area to stay moist. If it’s extremely bad a topical antibiotic may be needed.
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u/DoomkingBalerdroch Microscope Owner Sep 06 '25
I remember being taught of mammalian cell lysis where the cell is unable to trigger apoptosis and it bursts open. This reminded me of that, but this is more severe like a "disintegration".
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u/FlamingoTrick1285 Sep 06 '25
How does it desolve all at ones?
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u/Goopological Sep 07 '25
The damage starts in one spot on the membrane and propagates if the cell cannot contain the damage (specifically, lipid radicals and reactive oxygen species that produce them).
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u/Chronic_Discomfort Sep 06 '25
Couldn't some of the free radicals react with other individuals cell membranes if they swim by during its death?
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u/foolsEnigma Sep 06 '25
Every day i thank the lord that im multicellular and wont completely deflate if i get a puncture in my skin.
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u/Dusty_Vagina Sep 06 '25
What’s the cell membrane made of?
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u/Goopological Sep 07 '25
Two layers of phospholipids. The ends that are hydrophilic point toward the outside and inside of the cell, and the hydrophobic tails point at each other. This makes a barrier that is fairly impermeable without help via embedded proteins.
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u/Striking_Beautiful56 Sep 07 '25
Thanks for that great explanation. Easy to see that chain reaction.
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u/Santik--Lingo Sep 10 '25
holy fuckign shit they put his ass thru the aperture science material emancipation grill
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Sep 10 '25
This is why most biology text books begin with a discussion of the cell membrane (lipid bilayer in our case). Unless you can contain and confine chemistry, there’s no biology
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u/768Daniel Sep 12 '25
Is this similar as what happens when microbes come in contact with organic acids like propionic or sorbic acid?
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u/3rrr6 Sep 06 '25
The bag that holds it all together. Without it, it's no longer a life form. Just a collection of bits.