Animals are sometimes the guardians of amazing superpowers. Some cephalopods, for example, can become invisible on demand, to literally blend into its environment. For the first time, researchers have succeeded in recreating the phenomenon in human cells. From there to the invisible man, there is still a little more than a step …
Certain cephalopods, octopuses, and squid in mind master the art of camouflage like no one. And a team from the University of California at Irvine (United States) has long been looking for a way to imitate their color-changing abilities. Long-term work which leads these researchers to present today human cells capable of becoming transparent.
To get there, the researchers were inspired by females of a species of small coastal squid , Doryteuthis opalescens . They have specialized reflective cells – leukophores – that can change the way they scatter light . Inside these cells are leukosomes, particles made up of proteins – reflectins – which can produce an iridescent camouflage.
From animals to humans
After growing human embryonic kidney cells, the researchers genetically engineered them to express reflectin. The structures which then developed naturally behaved optically almost as they do in the leucophores of the cephalopods. And the researchers were able to verify – by applying sodium chloride solutions to them – that the cells thus modified could be activated or deactivated by an external stimulus. As in the octopus.
So, even if we are still far from (or not) seeing invisible Men walking in the streets, the project developed by researchers at the University of California shows that reflectin proteins can retain their properties in foreign cellular environments. Which is already a big step.