On Thursday, September 13, under the prestigious dome of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, with his team of specialists in “soft matter”, he was awarded the chemistry prize during this ceremony that parodies the Nobel Prize. With this philosophy: to reward publications that are a priori crazy, but rich in reflections and applications.
Where others have been celebrated for proving that mice breathe through the anus, Antoine Deblais, Sander Woutersen and Daniel Bonn have triumphed with their paper on chromatography to separate drunken and sober worms.
“Explaining what we do is always a challenge,” smiles the physicist. “My object is to understand how animated objects move by themselves. For example, the phenomenon of collective movement of birds called murmuration.”
Soft matter is a recent field of research – the concept was introduced in 1991 by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. And “understanding how the dynamics of animated objects, particularly biological ones, excites physicists, because there is a lot to explore.”
Rafting
That’s where aquatic worms come in. “They have the nice taste of being shaped like spaghetti, like polymers, and so they make a good laboratory object, because we know how to sort them according to their size and activity” – the famous chromatography.
How do you transpose the device from the scale of microscopic polymers to worms several centimeters long? Simple: “We make them go rafting, by making water flow through a labyrinth on a one-meter-long board studded with obstacles.”
“Much like you cling to the lampposts when you leave the bar, they clung to the obstacles in the maze.”
To separate the worms according to their activity, the researchers gave some the equivalent of a 4-degree beer to put them to sleep. “It has this effect on all biological beings,” confirms Antoine Deblais. Surprise: “While we naively expected the inactive worms to be swept away by the flow, they arrived after the sober worms – a bit like you cling to the lampposts when you leave the bar, they clung to the obstacles in the maze.”
As you might expect, scientists don’t organize races of tipsy invertebrates just for fun. “This allows us to find a framework to explain how active polymer material behaves and how to sort it. If we ask ourselves the question of applications, we can think of human spermatozoa, which are another kind of animated spaghetti. Separating them by activity can be interesting for inseminations.”
Another avenue: understanding earthworms, whose soil aeration action is essential for crops.
