Challenge met and hands down: more than 500 students and “blobeurs” from all over France made Friday in Châteauroux the longest blob in the world, 53 meters and 9 centimeters.
In collaboration with the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), they had come from the Paris region, Toulouse, Savoie, Nantes, Finistère and even Germany to merge their culture of Physarum polycephalum, organisms formed from a single cell and several nuclei.
Students from the Blaise-Pascal high school in Châteauroux, under the watchful eye of world specialist Audrey Dussutour, cut out the nearly 1,000 5 cm by 5 cm samples from all over France and then placed them on a concentric path on a tarpaulin. After verification by a bailiff, the participants thus broke the record for the longest cell in the world, hitherto held by the motor neuron of the blue whale, 30 meters from the head of the cetacean to its tail.
The “blobers” also overturned the record for the longest single-celled organism, held by the caulerpa, a green algae about ten meters long.
A project with Thomas Pesquet
“The record has the advantage of putting a spotlight on scientific research. There is a craze among the students, “says Nicolas Debus, professor of biotechnology in the Castelroussin high school.
The “Élève ton blob” program, followed by nearly 5,000 establishments from CE2 to Terminale under the leadership of the National Center for Space Studies (CNES) and the CNRS, consisted in comparing the behavior of blobs on Earth with that of their spatial counterparts. Thousands of students across France have slipped into the skin of a researcher to launch, together with Thomas Pesquet, for this unprecedented experience with these organizations.
“I am now curious how the cores of the blob will synchronize. The information should take more than 40 minutes to cross the blob. We are going to redo this experiment in the laboratory, ”added Audrey Dussutour.