Wednesday, 18 January 2012

The Procrastinating Prokaryote

This is the tale of a young single celled organism that just couldn't be bothered to do anything.

It used to be such a happy cell.
Swimming around doing everything it's DNA told it to do.

But then, one day, the little prokaryote bumped into a tricky topoisomerase enzyme, which totally changed the prokaryote's way of life!

Now, instead of swimming around, eating and growing, all the prokaryote wanted to do was waste its time procrastinating!!

This would have made its mother very sad, if it had one. But as Prokaryotic cells simply divide themselves, its mother was really its sister, and from there it just gets very confusing.

But nonetheless, the hours passed. The prokaryotic cell watched as its sister became its nephews, and its nephews became its great-nephews, and eventually, the prokaryotic cell had realized that its whole world had changed.

As everyone seemed to be moving on with their lives, the prokaryote was just standing still. Why little prokaryote? Why don't you want to move?

And then, all of a sudden, a miracle happened.

A sudden wave of radiation poured over the prokaryote's entire home!!!

Everything seemed normal at first after the initial wave. But something felt strangely different.
Yes!
The prokaryote had mutated from the interaction with the radiation, and was finally reprogrammed to move again!!
Surely this was a wondrous occasion!

However, all was not candy and sunshine.

The radiation had turned the prokaryote into a vicious, prokaryotic eating machine!!
DUN DUN DAAH!

The prokaryote started to move around, finding its prokaryotic siblings..
And just as it got close.
KA-SNAP!
The little prokaryote took a big munch and totally absorbed it.

After a few minutes, the little prokaryote was no longer little.
It had managed to devour its whole strange uprooted family tree, and was now dividing for itself.

In no time at all, the whole universe was covered in cannibalistic prokaryotes, all living to eat each other. The fight for survival grew grim and deadly.

But among all the  panic and confusion, hope was to be found!
A true predecessor of the original prokaryote had finally emerged!
A strange enzymatical screw up had caused one cell to be normal again, and no longer a cannibal.

However, the only problem was that this new little prokaryote procrastinated quite a bit.

And so it never really got around to saving the universe.


THHHEEEEEE EEEEEENNND!!!!

2 comments: