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Proteins Build "Cages" Around Bacteria
ananyo writes "Research in human cells shows that proteins called septins are able to build cages around pathogens to prevent them from infecting other cells. According to the researchers, the newly discovered defense system could lead to new therapies for diseases. The microbes trapped in the cage are later broken down by the cell."
Now the only thing that stands in the way is government red tape.
Perhaps, if this approach ends up working, not only could it be used for treating diseases but possible could be used to prevent diseases by somehow encoding them into genes. Not sure if you would do that just for folks who have a history of a disease or offer such a solution to a larger group much in the way we do inoculation for disease.
http://www.busyweather.com/
"I ain't done nuffin! Letme out bitches!"
Our bodies continue to amaze me. So complex systems, so adaptable and flexible. And the second amazing part is of course that we are able to "see" those molecular processes, can figure out how it happens, and subsequently manipulate it.
And of course this complexity and flexibility is not limited to the human body but basically all life forms on this planet. The more we learn about life, the more amazing it becomes.
If you think this is cool, then you should look up the work of Dr. Jason Shear at the University of Texas (http://jshear.cm.utexas.edu/jshear/). His laboratory designs cages/houses/traps for bacteria. One of his papers that I am familiar with is "Probing Prokaryotic Social Behaviors with Bacterial 'Lobster Traps'" (http://mbio.asm.org/content/1/4/e00202-10.full).
The body has two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, two kidneys, two lungs, two testes or ovaries. Makes sense.
OK, so why does it have only ONE HEART and ONE TRACHEA? Huh? Huh? How much sense does that make? Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, makes no difference, that just doesn't figure. Just about the two most short term vital organs in the body. Yeah, I know, the brain. That's why I said "just about." But I can see why there is only one brain. Think about it.
Actually, it seems to me that this fact boosts intelligent design. It's very possible to conceive an intelligent designer who plays tricks. But since when does evolution play tricks? Two hearts and two tracheae would be a very strong survival trait. Even a single trachea completely SEPARATE FROM THE GODDAM FOOD INTAKE would be a strong survival trait. Just imagine the man in the restaurant who has two trachea and inhales a chunk of food and gets one of his two tracheae plugged. "Oh damn! I've gone and plugged a trachea again. I'll have to get that looked at next week."
The limitation of evolution is this: each successive version needs to be a slight modification on the previous version. Some forward and backward compatibility is available.
Way back, we more or less worked as worms. A two layer set of cells shaped as a tube: one set inside the tube, which specialized in taking food in one end, digesting it, and spitting the waste out the other end, and the other outside the tube, protecting the organism, sensing for sources and danger, and working out which way to point. Bilateral symmetry is great for this: You have an advantage over predators since it's equally likely you'll go one way vs. the other, rather than having an obvious preference for, say, left turns. Why not higher orders of symmetry, say trilateral? Because we evolved in a gravity field, so mutations that take advantage of up and down (top-mount legs aren't that useful) tend to get kept while those that prefer left over right don't.
So why one trachea? Because when we swam, the gill system worked the best. It was more or less self-balancing and redundant where it needed to be: at the oxygen exchangers. Plus it reused the existing tech of single-intake. If you have two mouths, either you're buying twice as many parts just to eat twice as fast (could you even?) or you just lost the ability to eat larger things. So since there was little benefit in two mouths, it got abandoned. A twin-trachea setup would require a more complex (read: easier to break) epiglottis, and have balancing issues. So it got ditched: it cost too much to get rid of the single point of failure.
Also, having the mouth route to both the esophagus and trachea as another feature: safety! See, food goes in the opening that leads to the esophagus. Now if the food gets stuck, the folks with the trachea and esophagus routed to the mouth have an advantage: they can use the lungs to blow the blockage free. There are other features: cilia move contaminants out of the lungs to get trapped by nasal mucus and routed down to the esophagus: with two mouths, the breathing one would have to get thing all the way out to the outside by itself, and contaminants that entered via the eating mouth could only be kicked out one way: throwing up. So we'd leave a trail of phlegm and vomit for predators to find. Then there's how the sense of smell augments the sense of taste because they share the airway, which again makes you more survivable...
All the paired items you name derive from the bilateral symmetry modification. They arose on the sides of the worm, and here we are. The brain is rather bilaterally symmetric itself, and quite redundant. You might have noticed the slot in the middle?
As for one heart: multiple hearts have been tried! The aforementioned worms eventually evolved to have several hearts. Problem is, they're weak, and put together they won't move the needed blood volume at the needed pressure. The single-heart design is simply more optimized: it's lighter for its capacity and you need no complex regulation system to coordinate them to prevent one's mistiming from blowing out the valves on the other.
Again, if you were designing from scratch, you could do a better design. Whether it can be packed into 46 chromosomes without being cancer-riddled is TBD, of course. But that's more evidence that evolution is at fault: the "small changes a step at a time" plan won over the "rewrite from scratch so it will be better" way, because you had to survive, even in intermediate forms. A lot like software, really.
BTW, if one of your trachea gets plugged, don't wait a week. You'll be immediately down half your lung capacity, you'll only have one lung with which to blow the chunk out, you'll have to coordinate both sides so you don't blow the chunk out one and into the other, and all the time you wait the bacteria in there are going to be going to town turning anything of you they can eat into more of them. So yeah, things that encourage procrastination might get you killed (read: make you less survivable).
The trachea is composed of 2 symmetric halves, you could say that there are 2 half tracheas. You might have 2 eyes, but the second eye isn't redundant, it's for depth perception. Same with 2 ears. You need both kidneys under cases of heavy load. Same with needing 2 lungs if you get a UTI. The second testes is a spare, as well as the second ovary, I agree there.
The heart is composed of 2 separate hearts, you just need both to survive. And there's a terrible design flaw here, obviously : the coronary arteries are barely adequate even under ideal conditions.
...bodies continue to amaze me....so adaptable and flexible...
Wow, that has to be the most erotic comment I've ever read on /. :)
Someone mod this guy up, please
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
But I can see why there is only one brain. Think about it.
Pun intended?
That's all that's required.
How much sense does that make?
Logic? Vanity more like. You are nothing more than a chemical reproduction machine. Don't get above yourself.
Deleted
1 Cell leaves :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Good to know that Septins have a useful purpose. As far as I knew, septin genes were only good for tripping up excel users if they didn't know to change their column types from General to Text. I'd also like to know the purpose for the membrane-associated ring finger (C3HC4) (MARCH) genes.
I am a Time Lord, you insensitive clod!
I'll get right on that.
How much sense does that make? Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, makes no difference, that just doesn't figure
It does. Evolution tends towards locally optimal solutions for passing on genes. Individual survival is not an important trait. In fact it's a problem, because it means that the new generation competes with the older one, reducing the population turnover rate and slowing the process of evolution (which requires frequent mutations). If 80% of the populations survives long enough to produce offspring then that's great for evolution.
Intelligent design is different. Either your creator hates you or your creator is incompetent. Actually, it makes sense if you read genesis: God created animals after he creates cannabis...
Oh, and there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple brains. We do high availability clustering with computers now - just make sure that both receive the same inputs and they'll be in the same state.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The limitation of evolution is this: each successive version needs to be a slight modification on the previous version.
I'd add that practically infinite amount of modifications have provided to be unsuccesful - it's a blind process. The strength lies in diversity. The more diverse the gene pool the readier the pool is to confront even relatively sudden changes, because a lot of variations are readily available.
The ID/Creationists only see the one perfect path because of their religious belief. It would not be right for them to say that god makes 99 wrong decisions per 1 right, because it would degrade the image of an omnipotent entity.
"Bilateral symmetry is great for this: You have an advantage over predators since it's equally likely you'll go one way vs. the other, rather than having an obvious preference for, say, left turns."
I'm pretty sure that it's very common for prey animals like fish to actually prefer turning one direction over the other to escape and that many predators have actually adapted to this behavior, preferring to strike from a position where the prey animal will flee closer to them.
"The brain is rather bilaterally symmetric itself, and quite redundant. You might have noticed the slot in the middle?"
The brain is actually divided into two parts doing different kinds of work for the sake of efficiency. Experiments have shown that doing so results in a quicker response for prey animals reacting to danger. When the brain halves are not so specialized/divided the prey animal spends far more time frozen in position when confronted by danger.
Interestingly the same design also causes the directional preference in fleeing behavior, meaning that it's better for survival to be fast rather than random.
I used to think the brain was the most amazing organ in the body. But then I thought, look who's telling me that...
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
I thought the Septims turned into dragon statues or something to stop infections.
"The brain is actually divided into two parts doing different kinds of work for the sake of efficiency."
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm actually happy I only have one heart and one brain. First, for philosophical reasons. After all, if I can be shot in one of my hearts and survive, that wipes out several thousand years of poetry.
But mainly, having a single heart and a single brain means that when we finally hit the Deus Ex point (latest game, not the earlier ones) it's feasible. If you had 2 hearts, and want to remove most organic tissue to replace it with machinery, the question quickly becomes how many of your hearts you need to retain to provide adequate blood flow to your brain, i.e. the only other organic bit you really want to retain. Of course, you then have to make the call between some sort of stim pack that injects nutrients directly into the bloodstream vs. eating, and that's a whole separate can of worms. Still, as far as I'm concerned, the day when we're 80% machine will be the best day in human history. And I prefer stims. All the nutrition of food with no fat.
(If it wasn't obvious, this is all highly hypothetical. I mean I really do want this personally, but I can see how it's probably a 100-year long process of legal maneuvering and religious objections before we can even get a prototype and I'll never live to see it. With luck, at least my fucking grandkids will have built-in jet packs. Damn religious people.)
I like how the slashdot dudes know more than the life time scientist working on it.
Is that how you develop plaques in the brain?