This tiny organism contracts 200 times faster than we can blink, here's how

Article excerpt

A tiny, aquatic, single-celled organism can contract to one-quarter of its body length in less than 5 milliseconds, hundreds of times faster than a human can blink. Researchers have discovered that the organism, Spirostomum ambiguum, uses a calcium-activated protein network in a fishnet-like configuration to power contraction at much faster speeds than human muscles can. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has implications for designing faster artificial muscles and synthetic cellular machinery.