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New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics
- Jaygles 7y agoImagine trying to understand biology like we try to understand what we code day to day. I would need a brain at least 100x as large and efficient.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- peller 7y agoThere are early efforts under way to do just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
- hprotagonist 7y agoThis is "the andy grove fallacy": it's not clear that you actually can, because code and computational hardware was designed by humans and biology emphatically was not. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...
- paulsutter 7y agoWouldn’t it need to be clear that we can’t, before it can be called a fallacy?
- hprotagonist 7y agofsvo "proof", i'm willing to take it as an axiom that biological systems are fractally weird in ways that are extremely resistant to formalism.
- paulsutter 7y agoThe patterns will be understood, by machines in whole and by people in part. To think it’s impossible seems ... religious
- mvcalder 7y agoHuh, From where I sit, to think it's possible seems ... religous. To each his own I guess.
- stevenhuang 7y agoBut to think it won't _ever_ be possible? After a thousand years of research?
- hprotagonist 7y agoin a thousand years, of course, the things we're researching will be a thousand years differently evolved. My point, mostly, is that any "law" of biology i've ever encountered has an "except sometimes when ..." clause. I do not expect that to change; biology is best described in the language of probability, and evolution (if i may anthropomorphize it so without peril) is very good at ruthlessly exploiting edge cases.
- barkingcat 7y ago
- oever 7y agoDNA is spagetti code.
- ksaj 7y agoI would have thought fusilli.
- ccvannorman 7y ago* 'Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, "We need to rethink what genes are," says microbiologist and molecular biologist Gisela Storz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.' Wow. Amazing how incredible biology and proteins are and their still-barely-understood mechanisms. For anyone who hasn't already seen it, I highly recommend The Inner Life of a Cell [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y
- danharaj 7y agoThis is why you should be very skeptical of anyone who claims transparency between genetics and complex phenotypes.
- dfsegoat 7y agoIndeed. The whole "One Gene, One Protein [One Phenotype]" [1] dogma went out quite some time ago. ... But people and genetic testing companies seem to want to keep it going. [1] - https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/george-w-beadles-one-gene-one-enzyme-hypothesis https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/george-w-beadles-one-gene-one-e...
- dboreham 7y agoWe will eventually find that there's the equivalent of JPEG encoding (plus SSL and ECC) and that today we're doing the equivalent of someone with no knowledge of SSL or JPEG staring at a tcpdump trace of a browser loading an image over https, trying to make sense of the resulting hex dump.
- q6467655 7y agoCan you elaborate - I’ve always been fascinated hearing CS interpretations of biological processes.
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoOof. Every year I regret not sticking with genomics/ biology. Its changed so quickly that even what I learned at the beginning of this decade seems very outdated.
- cwkoss 7y agoDisclaimer: These are novel chemicals and most sources you can find them from are questionable at best. Don't even consider using these without deeply researching the risks from the specific peptide, the quality control of the supplier, as well as the inherent risks of injecting substances of questionable purity. --- BPC-157 is a really interesting peptide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPC-157 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPC-157 "It has been tested in animal trials for cytoprotective and wound healing activities. BPC-157 can contribute to wound healing due to muscle and tendon rejuvenating properties through accelerating the rate of angiogenic repair." It is cheap and readily available (on Amazon even!), when injected it appears to greatly accelerate recovery from injuries - it's been called the "Wolverine drug" (as in the x-men character with superhuman healing powers). It requires injection, so its use is most common in bodybuilders who are aren't as averse to injecting questionable substances. Many stories from people claiming it successfully repaired years-old tendon injuries and such. Some claim that oral administration can help with gut issues as well. Some select testimonials: Rotator cuff injury recovery - https://www.reddit.com/r/Peptides/comments/8iqbv9/bpc_157_is_living_up_to_the_hype/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Peptides/comments/8iqbv9/bpc_157_is... Bicep tendon rupture recovery - https://www.reddit.com/r/powerlifting/comments/5ewi2j/bpc157_for_tendon_repair/ https://www.reddit.com/r/powerlifting/comments/5ewi2j/bpc157... Non-surgical repair of rat achilles tendon - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16583442 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16583442 --- Melanotan is another interesting one - it's an injectable peptide that increases melanin in the skin. From the image journals I've seen reporting progress over time, it definitely is highly effective - one individual used for several months and went from a pasty caucasian to looking Indian or almost Black. He decided to discontinue his trial when his friends started making 'blackface' comments. --- I think it's a really exciting area of research, and I'm glad the people willing to take these risks post about it so readily on the /r/Peptides subreddit. Not for me, but I'm glad they're publishing the results of their n=1 studies!
- magashna 7y ago> one individual used for several months and went from a pasty caucasian to looking Indian or almost Black Crazy to think there's people out there doing this not for a high, maybe not even for science, but for...?
- GenerocUsername 7y agoI have a 4 year degree in "Biology" and all I learned was that life does a little bit of everything everywhere. There are patterns which we classify, but there are rule breakers at every turn because our classifications are not truth
- nydev 7y agoThis is my understanding too. Evolution didn't work of a master plan with clear divisions between systems..just whatever happened to work at the time.
- newsocks 7y agoHow are miniproteins any different than just peptides? The article references "miniproteins"as being the same as "minipetides"... as though these are both different from regular peptides. Wikipedia states that peptides are "approximately 50 or fewer amino acids" [0] while minipeptides are "a length of less than 100-150 amino acids" [1]. Is this article really just saying that "peptides are upending cell biology"? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropeptide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropeptide
- hirenj 7y agoThe difference is that the peptides are generated by chopping up larger proteins, while miniproteins are synthesised as short proteins. I.e. you need other enzymes to turn a protein into peptide, but a microprotein only needs to be translated to be short!
- doctoboggan 7y agoFrom the article: > OTHER SHORT AMINO ACID chains, often called peptides or polypeptides, abound in cells, but they are pared-down remnants of bigger predecessors. Myoregulin and its diminutive brethren, in contrast, are born small.
- gilleain 7y agoThats a bit confusing, as proteins _are_ polypeptides. All proteins are (poly)peptides, but not all peptides are proteins.
- gilleain 7y agoThe boundary between 'peptide' and 'protein' is a little fuzzy. There are 'small proteins' like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thionin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thionin that are 45-48 amino acids which is less than the (arbitrary) lower limit of 50. One distinguishing feature of a protein is that it folds, while peptides usually are too short to have a defined fold.
- 7y ago
- hinkley 7y agoIn retrospect it’s shocking that we are surprised by this. When life evolved on earth wouldn’t it have first been dominated by shorter, less complex proteins? Why assume all of those have disappeared? Especially when we have some pretty archaic forms of life still around?
- AlexCoventry 7y agoSeems a bit sensationalistic -- proteins with only a few dozen residues have been known for decades. What's the new development, exactly?
- jeffml84 7y agoHow long before pharmaceutial companies tell you that you have a "miniprotein imbalance"
- abledon 7y ago""" Later in life, myoregulin steps in to help regulate muscle activity. When a muscle receives a stimulus, cellular storage depots spill calcium, triggering the fibers to contract and generate force. An ion pump called SERCA then starts to return the calcium to storage, allowing the muscle fibers to relax. Myoregulin binds to and inhibits SERCA, Olson's team found. The effect limits how often a mouse's muscles can contract—perhaps ensuring that the animal has muscle power in reserve for an emergency, such as escaping a predator. Another small protein, DWORF, has the opposite effect, unleashing SERCA and enabling the muscle to contract repeatedly. """ I've noticed when I take magnesium that my muscles really relax, and jaw doesnt tighten as much when I sleep. this is from what i understand, because Magnesium acts as a natural calcium blocker, helping your muscle cells relax after contracting preventing excess muscle contraction (tightness). An interesting avenue i've started exploring is attacking the problem from another angle and instead of using mg, lying on a grounding mat plugged into a wall, which after reading this, is providing extra grounding for the "ion pump" described above? After sleeping on that mat, i feel even more relaxed than downing 500mg of magensium, i can even feel like the inner heart area be able to relax, which otherwise felt uncommandable to relax. Ben greenfield, a biohacker whos pumped his entire body full of stemcells at one point (including the netherregions), has recently been investing it [1] I can imagine since we know _so little_ about how even proteins and now these mini proteins work... how is the underlying electric system affecting the whole interaction a couple of abstraction levels up!?! what happens when the entire system is operating under a slight electric potential for 80% of lifetime, as opposed to being grounded? (static in a television signal) [1] https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking-podcasts/earthing/ https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking-podcasts...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aiphex 7y agoSuper interesting. On a side note the disappearing / reappearing top bar on the science site is incredibly annoying.
- bigmit37 7y agoI love these discoveries. Are proteins easy to detect and isolate? How does one tell where a protein begins and ends and if one megs protein is not just a bunch of smaller proteins. Also how do they discover the functions of proteins? Just turn them off and on and try to see what effect it has on the body? This is such a super interesting field; Any one have good resources (youtube) that show how this stuff is done in the lab?
- qyirius 7y agoSo how does a serialized format such as dna beget 3d protein graph structures?
- gateKeeper 7y agoThat was the most interesting article I have read in a while. Thank you for sharing.