And so, #14DaysofMicrobiologyPoems continues.
I reached out to the science Twitterverse earlier this month in search of 14 microbes worthy of poems.
Here is Poem Four, requested by @TyFordFever.
Deinococcus radiodurans: Radiation resistance
Five Grays of ionizing radiation can kill a human,
Hundreds of Grays can kill E. coli,
Four thousand Grays can kill the tardigrade.
Tougher than all these is another microbe,
The radiation resistant
Deinococcus radiodurans.
It can withstand five thousand Grays,
A strength that breaks apart its DNA
Into hundreds of pieces.
Yet it puts the broken pieces back together
In less than a day.
How? You may ask.
D. radiodurans has four copies of its genome.
E. coli has only one.
It’s these extra copies that are important.
If you had a necklace, only one,
Randomly strung with various beads,
How would you put it back together correctly
If it had been struck and broken into pieces?
But if you had four necklaces,
Each broken at random,
Patterns on one fragment could match
With patterns on another fragment.
Broken fragments of DNA find each other with this overlapping pattern,
And hang on to each other for dear life,
While they are put back together by proteins and enzymes in the cell.
And so on,
And so on,
Until the genome becomes reassembled.
Further reading:
Meet a Microbe: Deinococcus radiodurans. The Microbial Menagerie. 2017.
