Bacteria-Killing Viruses Wield an Iron Spike

sciencehabit writes "Scientists have long known that a group of viruses called bacteriophages have a knack for infiltrating bacteria and that some begin their attack with a protein spike. But the tip of this spike is so small that no one knew what it was made of or exactly how it worked. Now a team of researchers has found a single iron atom at the head of the spike, a discovery that suggests phages enter bacteria in a different way than surmised (abstract)."

Comments

Viruses wield iron swords

[Gideon Wells]

So, now that we have confirmation that viruses have discovered and now use iron weapons expect this to be the latest Syfy movie.

Re:Viruses wield iron swords

[MachDelta]

300 microns: the movie
Starring Gerard Butler as the voice of Bacterionidas
and Michael Fassbender as Infectillios
with Lena Headey as Queen Gorgorrhea
and Rodrigo Santoro as X3/rX35 the God-Virus
Featuring amazing microscopy effects which seamlessly switch between 4000x 10,000x and 16,000x views in mid action sequence!
Coming this summer!

"Tonight, we dine in the lower digestive tract!"

Re:Viruses wield iron swords

[moogaloonie]

I think dumb stuff can actually improve your cognitive skills if you approach it properly. I hadn't thought about gravity like I should've until I saw how wrong everything was in the Star Trek reboot. I gained an understanding about something without taking in any new information simply by seeing how it was depicted so clearly wrong that I had to reconcile (almost) every notion I held about about gravity. Similarly, American politics never made sense to me until I understood how professional wrestling is booked, scripted, canonized, and repeated or redacted right in front of the audience.

Awww

[Aerorae]

I always liked to fantasize it was a wooden one...

*THIS* is exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay attention, folks. Important things are going on. Our understanding of matter at the atomic level is improving daily. We will have a model of how matter organizes itself into life. Eventually, we'll be able to theoretically (not just empirically) understand the immensly complex goings-on of a single cell, then how cells work as a human being. We'll have much better control of diseases including aging.

It's a bright future for people who like life. People who are happy with their handful of decades followed by decline and don't have the courage to live longer can ignore these things.

Re:*THIS* is exploration

[MisterMidi]

Yeah, that's why life expectancy has been going up for the last two centuries or so. But don't let get facts in the way :)

Re:*THIS* is exploration

[BluBrick]

To be fair, life expectancy has been going up for the last 200(,000) odd years because in that time we have discovered and learned how to do something about some of the things that used to kill us early - you know, starting with predators, and moving on through weather and famine right up to bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, and influenza.

These days we have a tendency to live long enough for other things to kill us early. (Often it's ourselves - we haven't been able to do anything about that one yet!)

Life is an arms race, in which life only ever wins by beating its opponent, life.

Re:*THIS* is exploration

[tbird81]

I can tell you what's killing us early right now. Diet. Toxic chemicals - in particular inorganic ones.

Inorganic ones?

So NaCl is dangerous, but organic compounds such as CH3OH are okay to consume? I'll remember that.

Re:*THIS* is exploration

[ledow]

Diet? Seriously? We have the cleanest, most rigorously tested, most reliable, most nutritious, most easily digested and most available food sources that we've ever had in human history.

Part of the problem that you basically imagine, is caused by us having TOO GOOD FOOD. Too much of it, too easily available, too cheap, too nutritious (fat / carbohydrate is a nutrient!). We cook everything to rigorous standards (and though that does slightly increase incidences of cancer, it's a much better alternative to eating food raw by orders of magnitude) and check and control them through managed supply lines.

What's killing us "early" (i.e. earlier than we could potentially live but A LOT LONGER than even our grandparents were ever expected to live) is that we no longer favour longevity over, say, enjoyment. We are making conscious, informed decisions to eat too much of the wrong things, drink too much of the wrong things, exercise too little (and when we do exercise, don't do it anywhere near properly), etc. so that our time here on Earth can be spent doing things that our bodies were never designed to do voluntarily (roller-coasters!) but that we find exciting.

When farming was established, that left humans with free time. It's with that free time that we did all the myriad things we've achieved - from maths and the arts to social structure in modern Western society. All of the things you know as "going to work" is done because we don't have to have everyone till fields all day long, every day any more. We can put in 8 hours a day MINIMUM of productive work into something that's not required for a human to survive, even to the point that we are rewarded for doing so by being GIVEN the ability to have food brought to our door.

That free time from pure survival has become our anathema, but also our greatest attribute. What kills us nowadays is choice. We didn't have a lot of it historically, now we do. I can choose to not smoke, not drink, eat well, exercise and thus live - on average - for longer. Or I can choose not to do those things, and yet STILL SURVIVE PAST MATING, still nurture an infant to adulthood, etc.

Human innovation and ingenuity over eras have given us the ability to choose what we do with almost our entire lives. Use it. And stop worrying about whose going to "fix" the problem of being able to do just what we want with our life.

Re:*THIS* is exploration

[PhilHibbs]

I don't want to live for ever. The great thing about life is, there is so much of it. Trillions of humans have lived, and that's a wonderful thing. I hope that trillions more will live after me. This cannot happen if we live for ever, in which case those trillions will never have a chance at life. We'll be clinging on to the earth, and throwing down the ladders and stepping on the fingers of those that would follow us as we grow older and meaner and more jealous of the lives that we have stolen.

I want live my life, and then I will slip into the void and let others live theirs. And that fills me with joy, not fear.

Re:*THIS* is exploration

[ledow]

E.coli has been around for over 100m years. Even in the 1800's when it was isolated, it was present in every subject's gut flora. There's nothing "modern" about it at all. If you create food, especially food that's been anywhere near an animal, you have a chance of E.coli.

Salmonella is almost identical in these terms too. Animals have it naturally in their bodies, it's just whether it takes hold in a particular session of you eating it. If you're eating animals, you're going to get it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, ... People were dying of bacteria like this for millions of years before we worked out how to cook food properly (and even there, as you can see by how easy TOMATOES can be affected by a bacterium from animals, there's nothing we can do to stop it, or to stop it getting more successful at infecting us!).

And incidents of poor hygiene show you exactly what was happening even 100 years ago in terms of people eating food. WW2 "Stomach Divisions" were rife, and have been in every war prior to that. It's arguable that the UK became such a world power because we discovered several facts related to food hygiene.

Meat is no more dangerous than before. You don't have to be any more careful cooking with a modern cow than with a ancient one. The only fact is that we're much more likely to spot the cause and isolate it today.

There is also no amount of cooking or scrubbing that will guarantee your food free of such adverse effects. Our grandparents eat food fresh or not at all. We now *CHOOSE* to keep food for months because we can.

Nobody claims that modern food is perfect, but even in my grandparents time, we weren't able to station an army for a year without people falling foul of all sorts of stomach illness and food poisoning. In some famous historical European battles, nearly HALF of the troops used were out of action at any one time because of illness, primarily caused by food hygiene and the food itself.

The health scares you talk about regarding modern processed are like the modern "war" news. One person dies and it's front-page. Back in my grandparents time, entire streets of civilians were bombed to obliteration and didn't get a mention in the local paper because it was so insignificant compared to everything else happening at the time.

Today, a few dozen people falling to E.coli is "news", because we don't see E.coli much in the wild now because of the extent of processed and tested food. In my grandparent's time, it was taking out vast swathes of the army and a major problem.

Re:*THIS* is exploration

[AdrianKemp]

There are enough resources in the universe to support an effectively limitless expansion of the human race.

A lone atom doesn't make a sword

[jmichaelg]

A single iron atom isn't going to much of a sword. Iron swords work because the iron atoms support each other.

A lone iron atom might do something chemically like pretend to be a heme molecule to bypass the bacteria's defenses.

Re:A lone atom doesn't make a sword

[exploder]

TFA says specifically that, although scientists expected something like what you describe, the iron atom is in fact forming a sharp point that mechanically penetrates the membrane.

Re:A lone atom doesn't make a sword

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the iron atom isn't at the exact point, it's within the point and seems to serve as an anchor around which are an oxahedral cluster of folds wrap.

The key is that the iron ion allows the creation of a structure which won't unfold as it penetrates.

Re:A lone atom doesn't make a sword

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite, the entire tip (the pink in the image) is essentially sharpened by a single centrally positioned iron atom with the proteins behind it. Think of a bunch of copper threads hanging out at the end of a wire (the wire being the protein), those threads hang loosely and are not really rigid, but add a blob of soldering iron to join them together and they become much more rigid.

Re:Tools

[MooseByte]

It's worse than that. Now that the bacteriophages have achieved Iron Age upgrades, they can develop Archery and Siege Workshop. If they research Ballistics and deploy enough Helepolis units, they will become unstoppable...