Slashdot Mirror
Are 68 Molecules Enough To Understand Diseases?
Roland Piquepaille writes "A researcher from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) claims that 68 molecules can explain the origins of many serious diseases. After reviewing findings from multiple disciplines, he 'realized that only 68 molecular building blocks are used to construct these four fundamental components of cells: the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, glycans and lipids,' and he said that 'these 68 building blocks provide the structural basis for the molecular choreography that constitutes the entire life of a cell.'"
34 separate (common) sugars, + sugar-protein, sugar lipid combinations. Something tells me this guy has some stake in the acceptance of sugars in cell biology. By including the buildingblocks of DNA and RNA, but not their sequences and regulating factors, he skews the board drastically for his cause. Maybe he is right and there are some diseases dependent on attached sugar groups. But thus far, these are swamped by the number of confirmed diseases caused by mutations in the DNA, or infections by viruses, bacteria or protozoa.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Ifit had been properly summarized, it would have been fine. "The Cell: Not Just Software."
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
the really interesting thing is that roland never gets *any* rejects, no matter how shitty his submissions.
I completely agree with Marth's conclusion, but his letter is not insightful, he's simply registering a complaint about the rise of proteomics. It's not a research article, it's a letter to the editor. We get the same things in physics journals lamenting the rise of string theory or the decrease in funding for superconductivity.
Marth's call for interdisciplinary research and fresh ideas is good, but he's already made a mistake by grouping the molecules together using his own judgment. It would be better to present them all to a widely varying group of scientists and ask them to group the molecules in any way they would like. The idea that there are ~100 important biological building blocks is not new. But... this is just a letter to the editor, and the poster looks good, and we get the idea. Roland should not have picked it up, and it shouldn't be here, it was probably written for a department head somewhere who doesn't want to fund a new interdisciplinary program.
For someone who supposedly did a lot of surveying of the field he somehow missed an important amino acid: citrulline which is very important because many proteins undergo deimination and it results in change of function. And this is just from what I caught right off the bat. Let's just say I do not think the world of this article and the "quite a bit of information" is really "way too simplistic view".
>1. It's obvious - since these are the only components in cells, and they have all been known for years, how is this remotely interesting?
The ancient Greeks and alchemists too, thought the soul was a chemical, and even today the modern pharmaceutical industry seems to think medicine should be about finding chemicals to magically give us health. Biologists are a lower form of life than hackers, they're drip-kiddies.
It's like an analog hardware engineer I knew who didn't appreciate the complexity of software, and would say (half-jokingly) "it's all an analog voltage when you get down to it." The funny thing is, when I helped him with his software problems, the longer he tried to describe the code to me, the less I understood of it. He had a hardware engineer's mind: to him the whole program was something to be analyzed simultaneously, not as a step-by-step sequential modification of the data. I think he would have loved programming in prolog.
Hasan