Microbiology: Stentor Pencil Bag

Here’s a lovely zip bag featuring everyone’s favorite trumpet-shaped cilia, the stentor! This design will especially delight any Microbiologist in need of a new field kit, or another excuse to discuss regeneration in protozoans.

We designed this bag with help from Athena Lin, a grad student researching stentor’s regenerative abilities. In her words;

If I cut [the stentor] in half, they know which half is missing and they know to replace that half. This is crazy since it is one cell. How does it know top from bottom? How do they physically put themselves back together? These are all unknown. We have a clue that cell division processes might be involved because it looks similar to regeneration. I have narrowed down a few factors that are involved in the timing of regeneration but I am still far away from my dissertation defense!