Tiny Matters
Take a dive into the genes, microbes, molecules and other tiny things that have a big impact on our world with Tiny Matters. Join scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti as they take apart complex and contentious topics in science and help rebuild your understanding. From deadly diseases to ancient sewers to forensic toxicology, Sam and Deboki embrace the awe and messiness of science and its place in the past, present, and future. Tiny Matters releases new episodes every Wednesday and is brought to you by the American Chemical Society, a non-profit scientific organization advancing chemistry and connecting the broader scientific community. Tiny Matters is produced by Multitude.
Tiny Matters
Can evolution go backwards?
In 1893, Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo suggested that evolution can’t go backwards in the exact same way that it proceeded. This became known as “Dollo’s Law,” and came under a lot of scrutiny. But, more recently, Dollo’s Law was co-opted into the idea that traits, once they gain a certain amount of complexity, can’t return to a simpler state. In this episode of Tiny Matters, we explore two exciting examples where scientists have found that not to be the case.
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Here at Tiny Matters we love an old scientific publication. If you ever have a few minutes and want to have fun, dig through the archives of ACS or Nature or Science or the Royal Society or really any journal. It's really cool to go through these old papers and see how scientists used to write and how the ideas they're exploring build to what we know now. But today we're going to start the episode with an old article from the journal Nature. It's not your standard article. It's an obituary for Dr Louis Dolo and it was published July 11th 1931.
Speaker 2:The first line of the obituary reads Dr Louis Dolo, who died at Brussels on April 19th, will always be remembered for his numerous and valuable contributions to our knowledge of extinct vertebrate animals. And after a list of his various academic contributions, the obituary ends with he was an acknowledged leader with a devoted following in the new generation.
Speaker 1:In. Between those lines are the details of a scientific career that involved studying the fossils of reptiles and dinosaurs, and also a law that you might not have heard of, called, appropriately enough, dolo's Law.
Speaker 3:He published this statement in 1893 that essentially you know. He suggests that evolution doesn't go backwards in the exact same way that it proceeded. So imagine you had a time machine. You can go back to a point in time and you can then watch a lineage evolving. You can watch, you know, an arm evolve into a wing and you can actually document how it happened and the steps that it happened. What Dolo is saying is that it will never go back to that ancestral state in the exact same way that it evolved there.
Speaker 1:That's Jacob Suiza, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Jacob studies plant evolution and we're going to be talking about his work in a bit, but first we want to jump to a question we asked Jacob what are the implications for Dolo's Law, Like, is it worth considering at all?
Speaker 3:I think that it has a place, not in its original form. In its original form I don't think that it is all that informative In this other way, in sort of how it's been co-opted more recently. I think it does have an interesting application.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Tiny Matters, a science podcast about the little things that have a big impact on our society, past and present. I'm Deboki Chakravarti and today, with my co-host, sam Jones, we're going to be co-opting Dolo's Law to ask a question that's both simple and complicated Can evolution go backwards?
Speaker 2:So we have Dolo's Law, this 19th century idea that evolution can't go backwards in the exact same way that it preceded, and we also have Jacob, a 21st century evolutionary biologist, telling us that the original form of this idea isn't actually all that informative, and he's far from the first person to say this about Dolo's Law.
Speaker 3:They got criticized heavily, especially towards the middle and end of the 1950s and so on, because people were saying like you know, of course this is more of a statistical statement, right? For instance, if you walk to the grocery store, what are the odds that when you walk back you would take the exact same steps in doing so? People kind of recognize that. Particularly Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins were sort of you know, like, hey, this is kind of more of a statistical statement more than a biological one. But it eventually turned and got co-opted into this idea that traits, once they gain a certain amount of complexity, don't go backwards into a simpler state.
Speaker 2:So when Jacob says that there's something interesting to explore in how Dolo's Law has been co-opted today, the question he's referring to is if an organism evolves something that's more complex, is that a one-way street, or can evolution return to something simpler and you could?
Speaker 1:see why it might make sense that once evolution hits on something more complex, say an eye or a reproductive structure like a flower, it would seem unlikely to go backwards from there. Complex structures often come with a lot of advantages, like more specialization or capabilities that let you adapt to the world around you. But does nature actually follow that trajectory? For Jacob, this is a question for the ferns. Ferns are plants that don't have fruits or flowers. Instead, they reproduce using spores.
Speaker 3:These little dots on the underside of a fern, if you've ever looked under a leaf and what happens is this spore will fly in the wind and germinate and actually produce a small little plant that's called the gametophyte, which is the bite, the plant that produces gametes, right, so sperm and egg, and so it actually has these two separate and independently living generations of its life cycle.
Speaker 2:When we talked to Jacob, he was getting ready to go teach a course about ferns in Costa Rica, which is where his interest in plant evolution began. That interest eventually led him to ferns.
Speaker 3:I fell in love with their diversity. I really didn't appreciate how diverse ferns were, and it was really this juxtaposition between, I think, my expectations of ferns as being these ancient, shade-loving, water-loving organisms with the reality, which is that they are so ecologically diverse, morphologically diverse. There are 11,000 fern species. You know there's more ferns than birds, depending on who you ask.
Speaker 1:Is it the bird people or the fern people?
Speaker 3:A little bit of both, and so it was really that juxtaposition of thinking about ferns as this one thing and realizing that they're such a diverse group of organisms, that that's really what pushed me in that direction. So the evolutionary question that I fell in love with was why and how? Why do we have so much variation, right? Why don't we live in a world with a single leaf type or a single plant type, right? Why do we have all this diversity?
Speaker 2:One of the aspects of ferns that Jacob studies is their reproduction. Remember, ferns don't have flowers or fruits or seeds. Instead, they rely on spores to disperse and reproduce.
Speaker 3:And so what that means is they put their spores on their leaves, the same structures they use for photosynthesis. And this is a very interesting thing because it means now you have one organ that has to be optimized and I'm putting air quotes around that optimized for two different functions that actually have contrasting needs or demands. So, for instance, photosynthesis, when you open your stomata, those little pores in the leaves, it creates a very humid boundary layer right Layer around the leaf, and that's great for photosynthesis, but it's not good for spore dispersal because these little spore houses called sporangia have to dry out and open up.
Speaker 1:Very broadly, ferns fall into one of two camps when it comes to reproduction. The first does what Jacob just described they combine their photosynthesis and reproduction on one leaf. This strategy is called monomorphism. And then there's dimorphism, which is when a fern separates those functions. They produce one type of leaf for photosynthesis and another for spore dispersal.
Speaker 2:Since dimorphism requires more specialized structures and complexity than monomorphism. Understanding how ferns go from monomorphism to dimorphism could teach us how complexity evolves in nature. It also gives us a way to look at that co-opted version of Dolo's Law where scientists want to know can something that's become complex go back to a simpler state? So, working with an undergraduate researcher named Michaela Smith, jacob went through natural history collections that contain pressed plants that are labeled with when and where they were collected and that have been digitized to make them accessible.
Speaker 1:One of the first things they had to do was figure out how to actually identify whether a fern is monomorphic or dimorphic, because, even though that sounds like something that should be obvious, it's actually been a subjective call by people studying ferns.
Speaker 3:Botanists, pterodologists, those who study ferns, have often gone into the field and looked at a plant and said, oh, that produces spores on the same leaf it does photosynthesis with, so that's monomorphic. And they'll find another plant and it has this separation that I just described and they'll say, oh, that's dimorphic. But there's a whole gradient actually in between and the question really is, what are the traits that make something monomorphic and what are the traits that make something dimorphic, and can we actually see the variation in between if we quantify some of this right?
Speaker 1:Using image analysis software, they were able to take different measurements on those digitized samples, looking at things like the length of the leaves and the area of spores, to come up with a way to quantitatively classify the ferns by their reproductive strategy. In combining this classification with fern phylogenetic trees, jacob and Michaela were able to see how ferns made their way from monomorphism to dimorphism, except things were a little weird.
Speaker 3:You would assume that the evolution of dimorphism goes from monomorphism to sort of an intermediary form to this full form, and we found that that is not the case. You actually rarely do that.
Speaker 2:If you look across all plants, you find that reproductive complexity goes up over long timescales like tens to hundreds of millions of years. That's how you get flowers and fruit evolving over time. So Jacob had expected to see something similar with ferns, where you start with a simpler monomorphic state and you end up at the more complex dimorphic state, but instead the results showed that ferns could bounce around and, even more weirdly, they could go backwards.
Speaker 3:So once you become dimorphic, this putatively more complex state, you can go right back to monomorphics at no problem.
Speaker 2:So ferns don't seem to be following a co-opted version of Dolo's law. They're going backwards, and we wanted to know why Jacob thought that might be the case. So he took us back to the 1970s and a pterodologist power couple, warren H Wagner Jr and Florence Wagner, who hypothesized that the evolution of dimorphism in ferns would have been advantageous for a few reasons.
Speaker 3:They hypothesized that the evolution of dimorphism in ferns is adaptive for several different things. So the first is, once you separate these functions of photosynthesis and reproduction, you can then optimize your vegetative leaf for photosynthesis and optimize your fertile leaf for reproduction right.
Speaker 2:And there are other potential adaptations of dimorphism that could have made it important to ferns as well, like being able to time spore dispersal during certain parts of the year or orienting the leaf a particular direction or dealing with other challenges.
Speaker 3:So those were some of the adaptive hypotheses that you could imagine would make being dimorphic very important. But what this suggests and actually we're working on a much bigger project I'm working with some colleagues on a much bigger project looking at the evolution of reproductive complexity across all ferns what we actually find is that monomorphism is a late evolution in ferns. It's not the ancestral state actually. So the simpler state is not the ancestral state and it evolved many times independently, much earlier than some of these other types of dimorphism.
Speaker 1:Sorry, I just want to make sure that I understand correctly You're saying that dimorphism is probably more ancestral than monomorphism?
Speaker 3:A very specific type of dimorphism is the ancestral state of ferns, but then you evolve monomorphism and then you evolve these other types of dimorphism. So it's yes and no to answer your question. And what this suggests is that you know, instead of thinking about this more complex state dimorphism as the adaptive, you know, pinnacle of a fern reproductive evolution, monomorphism, actually merging these two functions together, there might be some adaptive value there.
Speaker 1:So when I was reading about Jacob's work, one of the questions that popped in my head was well, if nature can go backwards in evolution, can scientists also do that in the lab? And that led me to Nadine Ziemert, a professor of microbiology and bioinformatics at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Speaker 4:Nadine studies antibiotics I think everyone knows antibiotics as medicine that we take when we're sick, but I think not a lot of people know where they actually come from, because it's the same organisms that we fight with antibiotics Bacteria are actually also mostly the ones who produce it. So most antibiotics on the market are actually produced originally by bacteria to fight off other enemies, other bacteria.
Speaker 2:Nadine told us that there are a lot of different ways that antibiotics work. Some will make it hard for bacteria to build good cell walls, so the bacteria will just pop. Others get in the way of important cell functions like DNA replication or protein synthesis. Like Jacob, Nadine didn't necessarily start out interested in the thing that would become the subject of her career. Her focus was natural products, which are compounds made by living organisms, and while that does include antibiotics, she was originally studying things like toxins produced by cyanobacteria.
Speaker 4:What we know from these bacteria is that they're really nature's chemists. They make such a multitude of compounds, and so we looked a little bit more into detail, looking at the genomes of these bacteria. So there's an estimate that we only know about 3% of what actually bacteria could make. There's a lot of interesting chemistry still encoded in these bacterial genomes that we have no idea what they make.
Speaker 1:That work eventually led Nadine to antibiotics, and one of the motivations behind her work is the urgency to find new antibiotics, as bacteria develop resistance to the ones we already have.
Speaker 4:And unfortunately, because it's not very profitable for companies to make new antibiotics. There's actually not a lot of new antibiotics that came to the market the last couple of decades and really in the future that can be a major threat for our health, because there is estimates that by 2050, if we don't do anything against that then really infections will be the most common cause of death again.
Speaker 2:Because we know so little about all of the compounds that are made by bacteria. There are probably a lot of antibiotics that are just completely unknown to us. Bacteria have had a real head start on us when it comes to those antibiotics, evolving complex pathways to make structures that are hard for us humans to replicate in a lab For me, the major research question there was really to see how these antibiotics diversify, to understand how nature does it, because they have such a complex pathways and a complex structures.
Speaker 4:It's hard to make these new compounds if you want to create new antibiotics right. And so my idea was if we understand how nature does that, can we use that in synthetic biology to actually create new antibiotics that we want to make?
Speaker 1:So this was the other reason I was really intrigued by Nadine's work. My background is in synthetic biology, which is a very broad field, but I like to describe it as we make cells do what we want them to do, and that often involves various genetic engineering techniques to get cells to produce some kind of compound or molecule that you want them to make. And in this case, Nadine and her colleagues wanted to use synthetic biology to actually go backwards in evolution to see if they could bring an ancient antibiotic back to life.
Speaker 2:To do this, they focused on a family of antibiotics known as glycopeptides, which work by preventing the formation of the cell wall in bacteria. No cell wall, no bacteria. Some of the important antibiotics we use today, like vancomycin and tycoplanin, are glycopeptides. To study the evolution of these glycopeptide antibiotics, they looked at the gene clusters that make them possible. We often talk about proteins being made by a gene and that can make it sound like there is one singular gene that encodes a single protein, and that can be the case. But sometimes there's actually a whole group of genes involved in the production of a protein. These are called biosynthetic gene clusters and they're usually located close together in the bacterial genome. Nadine told us that these gene clusters can sometimes have as many as 70 genes in them, so they're really complex.
Speaker 4:We were looking into the evolution of these by looking how these gene clusters evolved, how new genes come in, how the whole gene cluster jumped from one bacterium to another, and really following how tiny changes in the structure of this antibiotic. That also changes the actual bioactivity or the effectivity of that antibiotic. And how is that reflected in the evolution of the genes right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because one of the things I was thinking about, as you were saying, that is, the genes are such a useful way to study the evolution, but there's also all this stuff that happens to make a protein, that happens after the level of what's expressed in the gene. So to what extent is looking at the genes able to capture the evolution of the proteins themselves and the antibiotics?
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's a good question, because these complex systems in a lot of cases not only make one specific compound but a multitude of specific compounds that are somehow related to them. In general, what we can see is that if there are major structure differences, we can see that in the genes. It's reflected in the gene cluster. So, for example, these glycopeptides they're made from amino acids but they only have a sugar component and the sugar component is quite different in these different phycopeptides. They can have a glucose or a rhamnose or very different kind of sugars, complex sugars that are not easy to make, and whenever the sugar changes we can see that in the gene clusters.
Speaker 2:So by looking at the evolution of different species of bacteria, along with the specific pathway encoded by the gene clusters, Nadine and her team could see that changes in the chemical structures of the antibiotic produced, for example its sugars, reflected changes in the DNA coding for it, and this led them to believe that they'd found a common ancestor for these antibiotic compounds, which they called paleomycin.
Speaker 4:But one of Nadine's colleagues, Evie Stegman, was unsure One thing that she was very skeptical first is like yeah, but if you look at this ancestor antibiotic, you see that this is actually more complex than the newer vancomycin, for example. So what happened? There is the simplification of the molecule, which first doesn't seem to make sense, Because you think something evolves from simple to more complex, which is not necessarily true. And then another thing was that she was like yeah, but how do you know? This is true and this pathway can make an antibiotic.
Speaker 1:And this is when I'm like yeah, I cannot really say but by turning to synthetic biology and using their knowledge of the gene clusters that their data said would make paleomycin, nadine and her colleagues were able to actually produce this ancient antibiotic and demonstrate that it is in fact effective, which I think is just so cool. Using the bacteria and genes and techniques we have today, scientists could go backwards in evolutionary history to not just see what an ancient antibiotic might have looked like, but actually bring it back to life so that we can better understand our modern antibiotics. It'd be like if you could have a conversation with your great, great, great, great, great great grandparent to understand more about why you are the way that you are.
Speaker 2:One of the surprising things that you heard Nadine mention is that they found the core of paleomycin is actually more complex in its structure than some of its modern descendants, like vancomycin.
Speaker 4:We asked why this might be the case. We still don't know. So we discussed a lot also with colleagues and I think we can see in vancomycin that this is still highly effective. I mean that's why we use it as a drug, but I think because it's less complex it's just easier to make. So antibiotic production takes a lot of energy. You know the more energy the bacterium needs to produce these antibiotics, the less energy it can use to grow. So I think that's always a trade-off.
Speaker 1:That's just one possible explanation for what's going on. But what was really cool about this mystery is the fact that it reminded me of the mystery of why ferns go back and forth between monomorphism and dimorphism. Obviously, ferns and bacteria are very different organisms and antibiotic production and reproductive strategies are very different processes. But in talking to both Jacob and Nadine, it was really striking to me how many parallels there were in what they talked about. Some of those parallels you might have already picked up on, like the fact that their work is driven by the diversity of their subjects.
Speaker 3:So the evolutionary question that I fell in love with was why and how. Why do we have so much variation right? Why don't we live in a world with a single leaf type right, or a single plant type?
Speaker 4:Since bacteria are nature's chemists and make such a diversity, for me, the major research question there was really to see how these antibiotics diversify.
Speaker 2:We also asked Jacob and Nadine if they had a question in their field that they really wanted to explore but just hadn't found a way to do it yet, and their answers were really similar they both wanted to get back to the original.
Speaker 3:When we look into the fossil record, the earliest ferns are just this mess of plants that we just can't place evolutionarily. We don't know who's related to whom. We don't have any idea, and so one of my biggest questions, my sort of moonshot question, is what was the first fur, what did it look like, and how did we go from that to the over 11,000 species that we have today?
Speaker 4:How did the first antibiotic evolve? How was that made and how did it look like? I think this would be a really fascinating analysis that I think we might be there at some point, but not yet. I think there must have been more than one ancient antibiotic, right? So what was the different ancient antibiotic, the first kind of antibiotics, and how did they then evolve to this diversity we can see today? That would be really a question that I would love to solve.
Speaker 1:But to tie it all back to our co-opted Dola's Law, this idea that when an organism evolves something that's more complex, it won't one day go backwards. What's interesting is how, despite working on very different questions and organisms, both Jacob and Nadine found examples from nature where things may have done just that. And really what I couldn't stop thinking about through our conversations is that maybe our idea of complexity itself is a little biased, so I asked Jacob about it. The subjectivity of like simple versus complex is really interesting because it made me think. To what extent do we define complexity as like? Its similarity to us Is seeing like an eye, seeing more complex, like reproductive systems. Is that something where we're like that has to be more complex because it's more like us, versus something that you might see like in a single-celled organism?
Speaker 3:I think we, as an engineering species, tend to think that more complex is better, and you know, as technology advances, it often gets more complex, and so I think we often apply those biases to the natural world in which it happens, of course, right, like the evolution of the eye is a perfect example. It's an extremely complex organ that evolved several times and it's adaptive and it's functional, right, but you actually have loss of eyes in lineages, especially those that end up in ecosystems that are essentially dark, and I would argue that complex doesn't mean more adaptive. Complex doesn't mean better. Yes, even defining it is subjective. But I mean, look, we live in a world where the majority of living organisms are bacteria, right, and they're very simple. I think, based on any definition or many definitions there's probably many that you can find that point to them being very complex.
Speaker 3:But yeah being more complex. Being multicellular doesn't mean you're better in any capacity at life. We live in a bacterial world and that's just it.
Speaker 2:Should we tiny show and tell? Yeah, I can go first this time if you'd like. I feel like you went first last time. Yeah, go for it. I'm bringing to you what I think is a very fun tiny show and tell. Today it's about contagious urination. Sam, it's happened For the first time in literally-. For us. I think you had one while I was gone right, yes, george and I did, and it was so funny because it had never happened for us.
Speaker 1:And now it's happened. We have the contagious tiny show and tell well, okay, we'll both share it yeah, but I will say before we share it.
Speaker 2:I just want to plug the newsletter for tiny matters, because I did include this one in a recent newsletter, so I put weird stuff in the newsletter like this. So I also put a link to subscribe to the newsletter in this episode's description. Let's talk about pee, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it. I can just kick it off quickly. So a paper came out on January 20th in the journal Current Biology titled Socially Contagious Urination in Chimpanzees, and I feel like if you see that paper title you have to click it.
Speaker 1:It's just impossible not to. I like was reading this in the news and I think everyone had the same response of like I need to know what this paper is about. And yes, yeah. So basically a researcher was observing chimpanzees in a sanctuary in Kyoto and they noticed that the chimpanzees all seemed to pee at the same time and they were like is this contagious? Is this like yawning? We're like I start yawning, you start yawning, everyone starts yawning. They collected 1,300 observations of chimpanzees peeing.
Speaker 2:That's hilarious to me it is and it was like 600 hours, I think, oh my God, like 20 captive chimps 600 hours, 1,328 urination events, that's so much peeing time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now I'm like okay, how long was each observation? Yeah, so they just found that like the pee was contagious If one chimp started peeing, another one would start peeing shortly after, and like they kind of just kept going from there. And also, if they were closer, like they would be more likely to start peeing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the number was around 10% of the urination events were chimps peeing within arm's reach of a chimp that just peed, which is like that's pretty close bud, like back up a little bit. So they're like okay, that seems slightly contagious. And then I thought it was fascinating that social rank seemed to influence if they peed.
Speaker 2:So chimps of lower dominance were more likely to follow the urination of other chimps and I thought that was also interesting and I guess there were some theories, because you wonder, is it just like one chimp hears another chimp pee? And they're like, oh, me too.
Speaker 2:I actually have to pee, you know which would totally make sense and it's so hard to know exactly why, but one thing that the lead researcher Onishi I believe is her last name, I think it's Ina Onishi told NPR, in the article that I read about this, that by keeping urination localized, the chimp group could maybe be reducing their risk of predators tracking them through the scattered urine scents. Right? So like, if they're just all closer together, there's less of the ability to track them. Yeah, you know, as opposed to, it's like okay, there's pee here and then 100 feet, there's pee here, yeah, and then another 50 feet, there's pee here. So I thought that was kind of interesting too. Like maybe this is a really smart adaptation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I had also read article that I was reading about it, they suggested it could also be a way to like maintain group cohesiveness, so like there's kind of like a social thing that's forming there. And so, like I immediately jumped to like you know, like when you're like at a dinner and one person gets up to pee and is like hey, do you want to go with me? And it's like yes, the traditional girl exodus to the bathroom.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say. This feels like the stereotype often rings true where it's like girls always go to the bathroom together. Yeah, okay, yeah, so what? Maybe we deal with contagious peeing as well? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:We didn't need to do this study.
Speaker 2:We know we know, we're actually just in the bathroom talking about you, but that's fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's what the chimps are doing. I mean that's what is like actually funny about this. Is that it's like more spontaneous? Because originally when I saw this I was like, oh, is this? Is that it's like more spontaneous? Because originally when I saw this I was like, oh, is this? You know, like this very human behavior of going to the bathroom as a group. But it's not really quite that, because they're sort of it almost sounds more spontaneous. I mean, maybe it's not. It sounds like we're all still learning here. It sounds more like one chimp starts peeing and others are like cool, I'm going to start peeing too. And not like one chimp rings the alarm and is like we're going to go off to this location and we're going to perform a little pee pack and like that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 2:Right yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm so fascinated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really interesting.
Speaker 3:It's cool.
Speaker 2:It only took us Okay. So we launched the first episode. The first full length episode of Tiny Matters was launched January 26th 2022. Yeah, the day that we are recording this. So this is not publishing until early February, but the day we're recording this is January 24, 2025. So it took us almost exactly three years. Though we didn't start doing Tiny Show and Tells until later. That's true. That's true, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we didn't start those until, I think, like five episodes in maybe six episodes in yeah, and then I was out for a while, so like that could have happened then. That's true. Yeah, it took this long.
Speaker 2:It took a couple years worth of time it took chimps peeing in a group. It was just such a good headline everywhere that you just couldn't not talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always wonder, like for scientists who are like doing this kind of research, do they know that we're all going to be so excited for this? You have?
Speaker 2:to it's. So this is like popular science story material. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Tiny Matters, a podcast brought to you by the American Chemical Society and produced by Multitude. This week's script was written by me and edited by Michael David and by Sam, who is also our executive producer. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. The Tiny Matters theme and episode sound design is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts and Leisure team.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much to Jacob Suisa and Nadine Ziemert for joining us. A reminder that we have a newsletter that we just talked about so you can sign up for updates on new Tiny Matters episodes, video clips from our interviews, a sneak peek at upcoming episodes and other science content we think you'll really like. Like peeing chimps. We will see you next time.
