Good morning! The semester is winding down and so this will be the last Monday Morning Math until mid-September (ummm, except for the bonus one I post because I forgot to hit submit one week). Today’s post features a Sierpinski triangle that just showed up in nature! We do love the Sierpinski triangle, whether in cookies or cake or cards or chapels, and so it was a delight to learn that (cyano)bacteria love it just as much! From the abstract of “Emergence of fractal geometries in the evolution of a metabolic enzyme” by Sendker et al. in Nature:
Here we report the discovery of a natural protein, citrate synthase from the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus, which self-assembles into Sierpiński triangles. Using cryo-electron microscopy, we reveal how the fractal assembles from a hexameric building block.
That’s right, this molecule forms triangles as it grows, and they assemble into Sierpinski Triangles. It came as a complete surprise, and the scientists still don’t fully understand what is going on. And that is the best, this kind of unexpected discovery of mathematical objects in nature.
If you want to see the photos, and you do, there’s an article by Katy Spalding in IFL Science and also nice 12-minute YouTube explanation by Anton Petrov with lots of fractal images:
I hope your own summer is just as full of discoveries!