5 ms·

It continually amazes me just how complex life is even on the smallest of scales. Before this it was ATP synthase - the tiny turbines that power every cell - t

It continually amazes me just how complex life is even on the smallest of scales. Before this it was ATP synthase - the tiny turbines that power every cell - that made my draw metaphorically drop https://www.teachertube.com/mobile/video/atp-synthase-a-molecular-turbine-youtube-287704 https://www.teachertube.com/mobile/video/atp-synthase-a-mole...

jcims 7y ago
You should spend a weekend doing a deep dive into how cancer works. You’ll come away fighting off the idea that it’s a sentient adversary with a much better understanding of biology than our own. The complexity of the environment it operates in is already astonishing, and then number of tactical mechanisms it employs to thrive in a healthy body seems one tick shy of statistically impossible to stachastically occur.
- comfymatrix 7y ago
  Do you know of any good resources?
  - jcims 7y ago
    I hate leaving no answer here but I’ve accumulated what little understanding I have through a sort of extended research exercise. YouTube, PubMed and just googling around has led me to a lot of info. Studying the mechanism of action of various therapies tends to surface specific systems within the cellular lifecycle and immune system. Read enough of them and you start to recognize terms and things make sense. Hope that helps
- ngvrnd 7y ago
  See "canine transmissible venereal tumor" for an example of the adversary having bootstrapped itself into ... being a semi-independent life form?
  - ChainOfFools 7y ago
    a few years back I showed a phylogeneticist friend an article on that. Halfway into the abstract, this guy - normally reserved and bookish type - practically did a spit take, blurting out "jesus this thing used to be a dog!"
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    That is a fascinating perspective I'd never have realised by myself. Thanks. You're a gift to horror/sci fi writers.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  This is essentially selection bias, it's the same thing as going to a high end gym and saying omg look at how fit everyone is. When you get cancer you encounter cells that through natural selection developed to beat your immune system so they've already essentially discovered every trick in the book and when you attack them the cells that survive are those who wrote a new book to do so. Things like tumor escape mechanisms aren't sentient they are just random things that cancer cells attempt and you only see the outcome of those that worked.
  - kiba 7y ago
    Good thing, that cancer, in a manner of speaking, don't 'learn' and can't 'learn' from other tumors. This makes it possible to beat them.
    - dogma1138 7y ago
      Not learning per se but cells do communicate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_signaling so some evasion techniques from one tumor or one cancer cell can propagate to others through various signaling pathways when applicable. Basically a cancer cell might start shouting "yo bro you should totally try this..." and other cells that receive the signal and capable of doing that action might just happen to try it, in fact in some case this is just how you get cancer, one cell starts yelling chug chug chug and all the other cells around it get hammered.
      - kiba 7y ago
        I meant that cancer cannot learn from other cancers of somebody else, unless they are infectious cancers.
        dogma1138 7y ago
        Well it’s not really clear form your original post since multiple cancers are quite common especially those which are linked to the same signaling pathways.
ta0987 7y ago
Less ads version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CN2XOe_c0iM https://youtube.com/watch?v=CN2XOe_c0iM
ASalazarMX 7y ago
> According to "Resolution of distinct rotational substeps by submillisecond kinetic analysis of F1-ATPase" (Yasuda et al., Nature, 2001), ATPase rotates at 130 revolutions per second when saturated with ATP. Fast little buggers.
est31 7y ago
Cells are extremely complex self-replicating organisms. They are so small and yet they can pull off this trick of mitosis that no machine made by humans ever achieved. Personally I think that the most interesting and hardest part in the evolution of life was the start of it, where you go from random proteins to self replicating structures (cells). It's easy to think of in-between steps for any post-cellular-life step in the evolutionary process that led to intelligent life but if you have no self-replication you can't have evolution. Most likely at the start proteins just floated around freely in water and did various random things, most of them not really useful. Every now and then some, by chance, some protein would do something useful. Now earth is big and before life, proteins could float around freely without being repurposed by bacteria or other organisms as building material. But the best protein that's the result of random processes isn't helpful without the ability to clone it in some way. Proteinbiosynthesis [1] is an extremely complex process that involves multiple substeps each needing complex proteins of their own to facilitate it. It also needs an ample supply of ATP that has to come from somewhere and not be wasted by "useless" proteins. The most simple cell that we can build today has 531 thousand basepairs [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_biosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_biosynthesis [2]: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253
- Retric 7y ago
  Self replicating protein are possibly something of an in between stage. https://www.sciencealert.com/amyloid-protein-self-replication-abiogenesis-contrasts-rna-world https://www.sciencealert.com/amyloid-protein-self-replicatio... Paper linked at the bottom: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02742-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02742-3
- pierrec 7y ago
  It's unlikely that the first self-replicating organism at the origin of life was a protein. As you point out, there are just too many moving parts that need to come together simultaneously. These days, I believe research is tending towards something closer to RNA, which has the nice properties of both encoding information efficiently and catalyzing reactions involving its own nucleotides. It may also have started with a type of genetic polymer that no longer exists in life as we know it. Interesting but approachable article on the topic: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-life-the-search-for-the-first-replicator/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-li...

jcims 7y ago

You should spend a weekend doing a deep dive into how cancer works. You’ll come away fighting off the idea that it’s a sentient adversary with a much better understanding of biology than our own. The complexity of the environment it operates in is already astonishing, and then number of tactical mechanisms it employs to thrive in a healthy body seems one tick shy of statistically impossible to stachastically occur.

comfymatrix 7y ago
Do you know of any good resources?
- jcims 7y ago
  I hate leaving no answer here but I’ve accumulated what little understanding I have through a sort of extended research exercise. YouTube, PubMed and just googling around has led me to a lot of info. Studying the mechanism of action of various therapies tends to surface specific systems within the cellular lifecycle and immune system. Read enough of them and you start to recognize terms and things make sense. Hope that helps
ngvrnd 7y ago
See "canine transmissible venereal tumor" for an example of the adversary having bootstrapped itself into ... being a semi-independent life form?
- ChainOfFools 7y ago
  a few years back I showed a phylogeneticist friend an article on that. Halfway into the abstract, this guy - normally reserved and bookish type - practically did a spit take, blurting out "jesus this thing used to be a dog!"
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  That is a fascinating perspective I'd never have realised by myself. Thanks. You're a gift to horror/sci fi writers.
dogma1138 7y ago
This is essentially selection bias, it's the same thing as going to a high end gym and saying omg look at how fit everyone is. When you get cancer you encounter cells that through natural selection developed to beat your immune system so they've already essentially discovered every trick in the book and when you attack them the cells that survive are those who wrote a new book to do so. Things like tumor escape mechanisms aren't sentient they are just random things that cancer cells attempt and you only see the outcome of those that worked.
- kiba 7y ago
  Good thing, that cancer, in a manner of speaking, don't 'learn' and can't 'learn' from other tumors. This makes it possible to beat them.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    Not learning per se but cells do communicate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_signaling so some evasion techniques from one tumor or one cancer cell can propagate to others through various signaling pathways when applicable. Basically a cancer cell might start shouting "yo bro you should totally try this..." and other cells that receive the signal and capable of doing that action might just happen to try it, in fact in some case this is just how you get cancer, one cell starts yelling chug chug chug and all the other cells around it get hammered.
    - kiba 7y ago
      I meant that cancer cannot learn from other cancers of somebody else, unless they are infectious cancers.
      - dogma1138 7y ago
        Well it’s not really clear form your original post since multiple cancers are quite common especially those which are linked to the same signaling pathways.

ta0987 7y ago

Less ads version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CN2XOe_c0iM https://youtube.com/watch?v=CN2XOe_c0iM

ASalazarMX 7y ago

> According to "Resolution of distinct rotational substeps by submillisecond kinetic analysis of F1-ATPase" (Yasuda et al., Nature, 2001), ATPase rotates at 130 revolutions per second when saturated with ATP. Fast little buggers.

est31 7y ago

Cells are extremely complex self-replicating organisms. They are so small and yet they can pull off this trick of mitosis that no machine made by humans ever achieved. Personally I think that the most interesting and hardest part in the evolution of life was the start of it, where you go from random proteins to self replicating structures (cells). It's easy to think of in-between steps for any post-cellular-life step in the evolutionary process that led to intelligent life but if you have no self-replication you can't have evolution. Most likely at the start proteins just floated around freely in water and did various random things, most of them not really useful. Every now and then some, by chance, some protein would do something useful. Now earth is big and before life, proteins could float around freely without being repurposed by bacteria or other organisms as building material. But the best protein that's the result of random processes isn't helpful without the ability to clone it in some way. Proteinbiosynthesis [1] is an extremely complex process that involves multiple substeps each needing complex proteins of their own to facilitate it. It also needs an ample supply of ATP that has to come from somewhere and not be wasted by "useless" proteins. The most simple cell that we can build today has 531 thousand basepairs [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_biosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_biosynthesis [2]: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6253

Retric 7y ago
Self replicating protein are possibly something of an in between stage. https://www.sciencealert.com/amyloid-protein-self-replication-abiogenesis-contrasts-rna-world https://www.sciencealert.com/amyloid-protein-self-replicatio... Paper linked at the bottom: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02742-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02742-3
pierrec 7y ago
It's unlikely that the first self-replicating organism at the origin of life was a protein. As you point out, there are just too many moving parts that need to come together simultaneously. These days, I believe research is tending towards something closer to RNA, which has the nice properties of both encoding information efficiently and catalyzing reactions involving its own nucleotides. It may also have started with a type of genetic polymer that no longer exists in life as we know it. Interesting but approachable article on the topic: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-life-the-search-for-the-first-replicator/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-li...