Thanks Ben! You've set a high bar for protist excellence that continues to inspire and motivate our thinking :)

My jaw is still recovering tbh 😂 reconstructive surgery scheduled for next week

Finally – there are many mysteries to still resolve for these cells. From dramatic metamorphic capabilities🤯 to prey preference and detection mechanisms 🕵️. For anyone interested in collaborating or getting their hands on these cells, these fantastic beasts culture well and we’re happy to share!

We couldn’t have taken this study to the next level without Omaya and Marine from team @dudinlab.bsky.social and Amy and Lauren from team @amyweeks.bsky.social . Together their talents brought the additional molecular and structural clarity we needed to model this circuit’s behavior fully.

This work shines because of @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social passion for these cells. She built it all—the cultures, transcriptomes, analyses, modeling and collaborations—from scratch. I can’t begin to express how brilliant and hard-working a scientist she is (and she's 👀 for postdocs!). So proud of her 🥲

More broadly, this circuit’s architecture provides a general control logic for organizing number and size of natural and engineered sub-cellular structures. Morphological circuits like this one can be viewed as building blocks for cell structure, analogous to network motifs and circuit topologies.

While our model was built to describe P. collini’s trap scaling, we found that the trap geometries of other suctorian species from different niches could be modeled as re-parameterizations or extensions of this same core control logic!

From this, we built a mathematical model of a single-cell morphology circuit that captures the resource allocation and feedback that optimizes P. collini trap structure, in which deterministic growth of tentacles competing for free resources is interrupted by stochastic jumps in tentacle number.

Key transcripts encoded centrin-like proteins, a frequent component of sensory/contractile structures in protists. We visualized tentacle ultrastructure by U-ExM with @dudinlab.bsky.social lab, discovering stunning tip and collar structures 🤯that add structural complexity to new tentacle formation.

Working with the @amyweeks.bsky.social lab, we used a combination of drug perturbation, proteomics, and sequencing experiments to delineate the cellular mechanisms that control trap structure maintenance and tentacle number. Critically, new tentacle formation required new transcription.

From single-cell feeding trajectories, we found that P. collini can adaptively remodel its trap structure towards the optimal configuration, expanding it upon capture and dismantling it during starvation. So what encodes the scaling and functional adaptation of the tentacle trap?

From >100,000 single-cell morphologies, we found that P. collini’s trap architecture scales anisotropically, favoring tentacle number over length. Remarkably, the observed scaling appeared to allocate available resources and organize trap geometry optimally for prey capture.

We found that P. collini traps display a broad range of morphological configurations: tentacle numbers from 1-25; and tentacle lengths ~15-30 um. To study this variation systematically, we built a deep-learning pipeline and suctorian-viewer app that digitizes the 3D morphology of P. collini cells.

Cellular structure self-organizes through an interplay between internal mechanisms and external cues. The single-celled suctorian P. collini builds a trap structure to capture large prey using microtubule feeding tentacles, creating feedback between cell morphology and prey availability.

Congratulations Omaya and crew -- such an amazing data set and resource for cell biology 🎉!