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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."
"I ain't done nuffin! Letme out bitches!"
Now the only thing that stands in the way is government red tape.
Government is bad, blah blah blah. Nevermind that governments are responsible for much of this fundamental research. Through public schools, public institutions and grants. Blah blah blah, shut up.
Yes, program your genes to build cages around cells. What could go wrong with that?
Well, except for the fact that the majority of cells in the human body aren't, technically, human at all. There are more bacterial cells than human ones. So, snarky comments aside, that would be extremely dangerous. You might be able to select only dangerous cells, but I very much doubt it. Not genetically, anyways. Anti-bacterial agents need to be targeted specifically, or you can do more harm than good.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
I have to laugh at you and the grandparent... all I can say is RTFA! :)
Our cells already use septins to build cages around bacterial pathogens - this research just is the first time someone has observed it in human cells. The talk of new drugs is in how to artificially encourage this behavior.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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 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).