What is it about?
Carnivorous plants trap animal prey to supplement their diets in nutrient-poor habitats. The genus Genlisea has specialised underground leaves that like lobster pots or eel traps, to catch microscopic animals. We show that the structures do more than this, and capture even smaller organisms like bacteria by ‘rectifying’ their swimming. Coincidentally, physicists working on co-called ‘active matter’ (swimming bacteria, or other moving microbes) have fabricated similar structures to separate swimming from non-swimming cells. We show that nature is already exploiting this aspect of physics to allow Genlisea to catch its prey.
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Why is it important?
In recent years, physicists have been trying to optimise structures that separate microscopic particles that swim from those that don’t. These so-called ‘rectifiers’ can be used in a wide range of applications including medical catheters that reduce infection, the delivery of drugs, or refining bacterial cultures for biochemical reactors. Our work shows that Genlisea produces a structure that performs exactly this task, honed by evolution. By studying Genlisea’s traps, we hope to design biomimetic structures that improve the efficiency of a wide range of bacterial rectifiers.
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This page is a summary of: The carnivorous plant
Genlisea
harnesses active particle dynamics to prey on microfauna, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2409510121.
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