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Nanobacteria Discovered?
mfh writes "The BBC is reporting that a new form of life has been discovered, nanobacteria, which was previously only theorized by Finnish researchers Kajander and Ciftcioglu. A team lead by Dr John Lieske of the Mayo Clinic claims they have found irrefutable evidence of the existence of nanobacteria, which is likely responsible for a plethora of illnesses."
Well, there was an article on /. about how keyboards & desks were one of the most bacteria-infested places you could find. I'm too lazy to find a link...
I don't think this is proven yet. Some comments from other scientist in the BBC piece suggest that the methods they used can be prone to false positives. This is probably a good one to RTFM!
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We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
we start seeing "Lysol, effective against nanobacteria!"
seriously, sometimes you wish things wouldn't be discovered, because the people in the world cannot handle them. they run around "OMG! the end of the world is near because I've got bacteria!"
too much living in fear...
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I wonder, could regular bacteria get infected by nanobacteria.
Evolution or ID?
This, the researchers argue, means the nanoparticles were multiplying of their own accord.
Wouldn't this also occur if the sub-200nm chunks broke up further after filtration?
A Discover magazine article talked about the recent dicovery that 1/3 of all life on Earth is methane creating or consuming bacteria beneath the ocean floor. Now we find a new type of life. Anyone else get the impression that we don't know s**t?
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
A lot of protein-like structures reproduce, but aren't considered to be alive
Computer virii reproduce too, but aren't considered alive either...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The argument goes deeper than cell walls (or the lack thereof). The fundamental difference is that prions aren't "life" in any sense that we recognize the word -- they're just misfolded bits of protein that, apparently, somehow, force other proteins to assume their shape. The proposed nanobacteria have DNA and a means of reproducing themselves in the same way larger cells do.
The reason for the controversy is that cellular metabolism and reproduction (the basic requirements for life) are fairly complex processes which require fairly complex molecular machinery, and these critters seem to be too small to contain that machinery. Geek analogy: suppose someone claimed to have invented a computer the size of a wristwatch that had the same processing power as a building-size supercomputer. It would be fascinating, but we'd be right to be skeptical.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Agreed on all counts. The New Scientist article that someone else linked goes in to the politics a bit, and is a good read. Interestingly, the major article by a sceptic was submitted to PNAS, track II (for those who don't know, track II means it gets published without review, since PNAS is a bit of an "old boys club") so it should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, the science in that paper looks decent to me on the whole, at least in terms of raising questions that still need to be answered, most notably about the genetic material of these things.
There's also an article by the original group claiming that the nanobacteria induce apoptosis in a variety of cells, including fibroblasts in cell culture. This doesn't make any sense to me, evolutionarily, pathogenically, or physiologically. I haven't read that paper yet, only the abstract, but I still feel like I need to see a whole lot more good data on these things before I'll be convinced.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
If CVD were caused solely by infection, then there would be no correlation to diet, provided immune function is accounted for (which is the case in most studies). Furthermore, if infection were the primary in CV events like stroke & heart attack, any person with cardiovascular disease that became immunosuppressed would have an immediate vascular event of some kind. Not all heart transplant patients have a stroke as soon as they are started on immunosuppressive drugs. In fact, most don't.
I'm not saying that it's not possible that infection causes CVD, I think it probably does. I am saying, however, that it is not the only mechanism. Just like H./C. pylori infection is not the only cause of stomach ulcers. This is why a lot of "on the edge" theories don't get into 1st tier journals; they speak in absolutes. Scientists don't like it when the first paper on a subject comes right out and says "This IS the way it is, because of such and such". First papers on a subject are always considered preliminary, and should be worded as such. We have enough trouble with the media touting things as absolutes without our own ranks encouraging or feeding the behavior.
By the way, Warren & Marshall's paper describing the effect of C. pyloriwas published in Lancet. Subsequent papers were in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and Journal of Clinical Pathology. Hardly obscure journals. Techniques for screening people for the bacterium were developewd within four years of the first paper on the subject. Three years after the first paper attempting to fulfill Koch's postulates. Doesn't sound like he was kicked out of the field. A quick Pubmed search shows that they kept up a steady stream of journal articles, even to today.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
IANIITMP (I Am Not Involved In The Medical Profession)
</DISCLAIMER>
Both of your comments make a lot of sense. It seems to me that it could very well be that high cholesterol provides an enviornment friendly to something like nano-bacteria (or whatever). Or that there is some other factor (such as an immune system vulnerability) that manifests as high cholesterol in people with a susceptibility to heart disease.
What I'm trying to say is that one does not necessarily exclude the other. Both could be related. Maybe I'm not expressing this correctly, but then again, I'm in the profession of moving IP packets, not blood cells.
Well, the first thing is that not everyone actually agrees that these things are alive. They haven't been able to extract nucleic acids from the structures. So either we need better tools to extract them, or these nanobacteria function in an completely and utterly different way than the rest of life as we know it. Forget anabolic respiration and whatnot. There's obviously SOMETHING happening, however, as they're able to get this stuff to reproduce in culture.
Once we've figured out what it actually is, then we can figure out how it's put together, then we can start tinkering with it, but my guess is that's going to be quite a ways off.
The article simply claims that this is new evidence. Blame michael for saying it is a new discovery.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
They're growing crystals.
"But if you go back to how we defined life prior to our knowing about DNA, our criteria was that things multiplied in culture. This is what we have."
There's a reason that archaic definition has been supplanted.