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Animalcules and Their Motors

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In 1674, a Dutch cloth merchant in Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, spent his free time tinkering with lenses. One day, he pressed a drop of rainwater beneath his homemade microscope and observed what he called “animalcules” darting about. Leeuwenhoek described these creatures in two letters he sent to the Royal Society in London for publication, each replete with charming descriptions: Leeuwenhoek may have been the first person to see microbes in motion, but his microscopes weren’t powerful enough to see the actual machinery responsible. (Leeuwenhoek mused that his animalcules might be using “little paws” to move.) It wasn’t until the 1830s that a German naturalist, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, saw whisker-like appendages, later named flagella, protruding from microbes. Still, the mechanism by which they worked remained unknown until the latter half of the 20th century, when electron microscopes finally homed in on the thousands of proteins that make a flagellar motor, able to convert

Back to Articles Back to Articles Animalcules and Their Motors Words by Niko McCarty The Column Issue 08 Back to Articles Animalcules and Their Motors Advances in cryo-electron microscopy are revealing the molecular intricacies of cell movement. Example H2 Example H3 ‍ In 1674, a Dutch cloth merchant in Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, spent his free time tinkering with lenses. One day, he pressed a drop of rainwater beneath his homemade microscope and observed what he called “animalcules” darting about. Leeuwenhoek described these creatures in two letters he sent to the Royal Society in London

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