012: Stanford Researcher Explains The Science Behind Ant-Man

Ant-Man is Hank Pym, famous biochemist, who was able to create these magical particles, when combined with the suit, was able to shrink his size down to the size of an ant. And when he needed to, he could increase the size back to the grown adult that he was before. So that's how you would do it in the comic books, but in real life, there are actual molecular mechanisms that regulate these processes.

Size variation already exists within a natural population. In humans, you have people that are very, very short and those that are very, very tall. But more importantly, there's a continuum that exists between those two points. Now what's really interesting is that there are natural genetic and environmental processes that regulate that size difference.

We just published some work looking at ants, specifically, where we were able to explore the difference and the size variation that exists within an ant colony and be able to match up environmental mechanisms, such as epigenetic mechanisms, more specifically DNA methylation, and how they regulate size difference in ants. So DNA methylation is a chemical modification that can be made to your DNA that regulates a lot of the ways in which your genes function. And when you look at a lot of the growth, development, and sizing pathways that exist across the animal kingdom and, specifically, in ants, most of them can be found to be regulated by the same processes.

So what we did is we took the ants during an early developmental stage, and we gave them drugs that could manipulate DNA methylation. When we added drugs that increase the amount of DNA methylation, we made them much smaller, in fact smaller than exists in the natural population. And when we added drugs that inhibited DNA methylation, we made them much larger. More importantly, we were able to narrow those differences down to an individual gene.

Now what was important about that gene, especially across an entire population, is that when we saw a 10% change in size, we saw a 10% change in DNA methylation of that specific gene. when we saw 20% change in size, we saw a 20% change in DNA methylation as well. If I were Hank Pym and I wanted to imagine a new way of making a suit that regulate my size so I could shrink if I really had to, I would probably focus more on these epigenetic mechanisms that regulate size, as opposed to Pym Particles. There is still one power that we didn't talk about, and it's the ability to talk to ants. Now whether that involves pheromones or anything else, I'm not too sure. Perhaps that's a conversation left for another time.