6 ms·
Crispr-Resistant Viruses Build ‘Safe Rooms’ to Shield Genomes from Enzymes
- dddddaviddddd 7y agoWould be interesting to do some sort of high throughput screening of Jumbo Phages versus bacteria or CRISPR versus viruses to see what other systems might exist.
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoI just imagine Jeff Goldblum intoning "You thought you had control?". I am a slow coder, I try things out, experiment and keep my old code somewhere. Eventually I hit on a problem and think "hey I wrote something that did that... where was it". Now give me a billion years of trying out code. I will have some serious tricks :-)
- duelingjello 7y agoI was thinking MC Hammer in parachute pants doing his signature dance but JG works too. Evolution and life is a constant “spy vs. spy” cat & mouse game to capture and defend energy. For example, industrial-scale meat agriculture is suicidal and omnicidal because it is a perfect “Petri dish” bioreactor accelerating the evolution of pandemic diseases and antibiotic resistance... it should be illegal because it’s an anthropogenic risk we created unnecessarily. It’s interesting how viruses could be considered life if you count that they do replicate, albeit parasitically, and they do defend energy by making more of themselves (whereas lions eat deer or humans eat potato chips and get fat and/or reproduce).
- dannykwells 7y agoA beautiful study with interesting implications for the evolution of the different CRISPR systems. Congrats to the team. I'm curious how this study, published in Nature, is different than this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-019-0612-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-019-0612-5 Published in Nature Microbiology. Maybe just the institution?
- digital_plumber 7y agoThe two studies show essentially the same findings, but despite their co-publication, it looks like the discovery was documented by Mendoza et al. over a year in advance of Malone et al. Mendoza et al. spent over a year (!) in review versus two weeks for Malone et al. Mendoza et al. submitted to Nature: 2018-07-16 posted to bioRxiv: 2018-07-17 accepted: 2019-10-11 published: 2019-12-09 Malone et al. posted to bioRxiv: 2019-09-25 submitted to Nature Microbio: 2019-10-03 accepted: 2019-10-17 published: 2019-12-09
- GenerocUsername 7y agoLife is the sci-fi "grey-goo" with an energy budget.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoLife is nothing but molecular nanotechnology we didn't invent and can't control... yet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- erikpukinskis 7y agoThe “nothing but” in that sentence makes it false.
- unkulunkulu 7y agoYep, emergence cannot be ignored
- gus_massa 7y agoSomewhat related: You may enjoy the song "Nanobot" from the acapellascience channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc
- petjuh 7y agoI wonder if neclei were "invented" by viruses as those safe rooms. There are already theories that DNA was first invented by viruses to protect against cleaving by RNAases, and the presence of UDNA viruses suggests it. It would also explain how DNA had immediate selective advantage over RNA.
- ertert345 7y agoIn the book The Vital Question the author argues that nuclei were invented to protect against the original mithocondrial DNA: > Introns are the result of "a barrage of genetic parasites" that early eukaryotes faced from their own endosymbionts; nuclei evolved as a defence against this, allowing spliceosomes to remove introns from transcribed messenger RNA before ribosomes can translate them into proteins.
- DrAwdeOccarim 7y agoThis is a super cool idea I hadn't hear before. Can you share any good references?
- agumonkey 7y agoThe hunt will never end..
- FrozenVoid 7y agoSounds similar to viral capsid development, likely the same process occurs in "safe room" construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsid `Some viruses, such as bacteriophages, have developed more complicated structures due to constraints of elasticity and electrostatics.`