ABOVE: Stentor roeseli
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, PICTUREPEST
Reproducing the results of a 100-year-old discredited study, a paper in Current Biology today (December 5) confirms that the pond-dwelling protozoa Stentor roeseli can make complex and predictable behavior modifications to escape harm.
“What [the paper] shows is that a single cell can have several different possible responses and then choose among them in a defined order,” says cell geometrist Wallace Marshall of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “Jennings had reported this more than a century ago but nobody really believed it, so showing this result again using modern methods is really exciting in my opinion,” he continues. “I love the fact that they really took the old results very seriously.”
It’s fascinating . . . that a single cell that is not a neuron has everything you need to make a decision.
S. roeseli, which lives ...
