Think of those tiny fresh water droplets on the leaves at daybreak - refreshing, isn’t it? Imagine each of these droplets as microscopic ‘light sensor’ laying still on the leaves’ surface. Unimagiable?
Neither do you have to make that effort as they now exist in reality! Yes, the Oxford University and Duke University scientists have meticulously used those tiny water droplets to make a ‘unique’ microscopic light sensor, turning water droplets into protocells.
The empty artificial ‘protocells’ can be filled with different cellular components, used for simulating biological systems like heart muscle or brain tissue. The scientists have made an individual protocell from each water droplet of a millimeter size.
A protein - bacteriorhodopsin – normally used by bacteria in producing energy has been taken and incorporated into a network of droplets, which can react to green light by pumping protons across a cell membrane. This in turn, can create a positive electrical charge.
Such water droplets could be arranged to form ‘pixels’ in an imaging array, which in future can be used to behave as an artificial eye.
This approach, for the first time, could successfully make protocells work together to perform a function, both biologically and evolutionarily.
This, perhaps, is one of the bizarre and amazing marriage of nature and technology, giving birth to artificial vision derived from water droplets!
