Cells May Communicate Through Light

SilverLobe writes "The hypothesis that living cells may use photons for communications has been on the fringes of cell biology for a while. No proof positive exists, but there is some strong circumstantial evidence. Byte Size Biology reports on a simple experiment that shows how the unicellular protozoan Paramecium may use so called 'biophotons' to signal for growth and feeding. The original academic paper in PLoS ONE concludes: '... not all cellular processes are necessarily based on a molecule-receptor recognition. The non-molecular signals are most probably photons. If so, cells use more than one frequency for information transfer and mutual influence.'"

Comments

International Institute of Biophysics

[Eukariote]

Biophotons have been a long-term research focus at the International Institute of Biophysics. Quoting from their webpage:

Worldwide there are about 40 scientific groups working on biophotons. The biggest association is the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB) e.V., founded in 1996 in Neuss (Germany) for an interdisciplinary approach of the understanding and the investigation of living systems.

Re:Bad science may communicate through Slashdot

[Eukariote]

Seriously, he replicated these studies 4 times TOTAL.

You have misread the abstract and have not read the experimental-setup section of the paper, which read:

Each experimental block consisted finally of 10 units: 2 types of material (glass or quartz) ×5 combinations of Paramecium (an inner cuvette containing 5 Paramecium within a cuvette containing 100 Paramecium, an inner cuvette with 5 Paramecium within a cuvette containing medium only or demineralised water, and an inner cuvette containing medium only or demineralised water within a cuvette containing 100 Paramecium). Twenty-eight blocks were assayed in 14 experimental sessions that were performed at different days. In each session two blocks were randomly placed on a four by five grid, where the units were optically separated from each other by a black carton.

As might be expected, they did more than enough replication runs to get sufficiently narrow error bars to show a significant inter-cuvette communication effect that, presumably, is light-mediated.