Author: Sid Perkins / Source: Science News for Students
An ancient type of plant has inspired the creation of a new type of measuring tool. Truly tiny, it can collect and move just a few drops of liquid at most. The design, a type of pipette, has several benefits over older types. For instance, it picks up water without the need for suction.
Pipette (Py-PET) is a term from the French that means “little pipe.” As its name suggests, it’s a small tube. It works a bit like a scientific eyedropper. Chemists and other scientists use pipettes to move small, precise amounts of fluid between containers — from a beaker to a test tube, for example.
It takes a lot of practice to use a pipette accurately, notes Hirofumi Wada. He works at Ritsumeikan (RIT-su-MAY-khan) University in Kusatsu (KOO-saht-su), Japan. As a biophysicist, he studies how physical forces affect living things — or are generated by them. Wada is one of the new pipette’s designers.
Precisely controlling the suction that slurps up a small amount of liquid is challenging, he says. Pipettes may have markings on the side to help lab workers measure how much fluid they collect. But even those gauges, he notes, can be hard to read or to rely upon. So research that relies on pipetted fluids may not be as reliable as researchers would like.
Wada hopes that his team’s new device might make such problems a thing of the past.
An idea sprouts
Wada was talking with a colleague one day when they started to chat about liverworts. These are plants whose ancestors were some of the first to grow on land. Fossils suggest that would have been more than 470 million years ago. Liverworts are quite simple. They lack roots, flowers and seeds. But like many modern plants, they do come in male and female forms.
One part of the female liverwort looks like a tiny, pointy-topped umbrella. But unlike an umbrella, this part of the liverwort has no cloth covering. It has only several fingerlike projections that curve down around a stem. When rain falls on this structure, a droplet dribbles inside those “fingers.” There it becomes trapped next to the stem. This creates a moist spot for the plant’s eggs to be fertilized.
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When Wada heard about this, an idea immediately sprang to mind: What if a pipette could be designed to collect and hold water the same way? His team modeled its new device, in part, on a female part of a liverwort known as Marchantia polymorpha (Mar-SHAN-tee-uh Pah-lee-MOR-fuh).
They didn’t…
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