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Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?
- AtomicOrbital 4y agohuman body temp is high to thwart off fungi yet now fungi has evolved to handle high temp https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLndueWMub3JnL3JhZGlvbGFi&ep=14&episode=Mzc0YzNkN2QtYjFjNC00ZDg0LWFiYTAtYjc3ZjU1NDZiNDk5 https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLndueWMub3... fungi evolves to higher temp due to climate change now can invade human body
- artur_makly 4y agoso .. micro-dosing YES? no??
- version_five 4y agoSometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
- sorokod 4y agoLike the Extended Phenotype thing explored by Dawkins.
- unity1001 4y ago> Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms I believe that we were well-organized colonies of bacteria was proven long time ago. We are literally a unified collective of cells.
- astrange 4y agoProkaryotes, not bacteria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-domain_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-domain_system
- unity1001 4y agoEvaluates to the same concept of we being collectives.
- lanstin 4y agoWow that was awesome to read. Biology keeps blowing its old theories out of the water. All of the excitement about rapid genome sequencing is being borne out, even tho you don’t read about bioinformatics so much. So bacteria are an offshoot from our lineage. We really are learning a lot so quickly.
- CSSer 4y agoI think you’re thinking of a Philip K. Dick short story. I’ll see if I can find it. Edit: I was thinking of autofac, which is kind of like what you’re describing but arguably it was only a small plot detail. People get downvoted for the strangest things on here sometimes. In this case it just makes me laugh.
- maxbond 4y agoReminded me of The Electric Ant https://archive.org/details/PhilipK.DickTheElectricAnt https://archive.org/details/PhilipK.DickTheElectricAnt I have a hypothesis that commenters sometime interpret recommendations in this format ("I think you're thinking of X") as being presumptive, because it implies someone made a mistake in their thinking. I'm not trying to say it is or isn't, just that I've seen a pattern of similar posts downvoted, and this is my hypothesis as to why.
- version_five 4y agoI'm the poster the parent replied to and I appreciated the comment, and yours. I don't know why it would be modded down I've just been trying to remember the movie Prometheus, the discussion between David and Weyland at the beginning where Weyland explains he is David's creator - this, I believe, sort of touches on the same idea - learning someone created you, maybe not very deeply; I'll need to watch it again
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoThere's also a short story by Stephen Baxter in Phase Space (a very excellent collection) called Dante Dreams where a researcher becomes aware of the dreaming consciousness of her own organelles.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoI mean it's a matter of perspective but... we are aren't we?
- pmayrgundter 4y agoBasically agree. There is an important part in what is meant by "machine". Mechanics, strictly speaking, is pervasive in but not sufficient to account for the life process. There's something else going on that looks like classical teleos and both the cells and the organism have it. There's interesting work to get teleos out of mechanics in far from equilibrium thermodynamics.. Prigogine, Kauffman, Wolfram, Deacon, England even Dennet.
- ip26 4y agoIn a sense that’s very true. However the biggest wrinkle is that most of your cells share a single common ancestor cell. If your body is a community of microbes, it’s mostly a village of close relatives, not a symbiote like coral.
- jvanderbot 4y agoAh, I heard quite differently when including microbiome. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270 "More than half your body is not human"
- pmayrgundter 4y agoI believe that's incidental. There are abiotic mice which seem basically the same but require smth like 20% more calories in their diet for same metabolic level.
- lioeters 4y ago> most of your cells share a single common ancestor cell We call her LUCA, last universal common ancestor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor
- klyrs 4y ago> Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. Wait 'til you find out that those "microorganisms" are themselves machines... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_machine#Biological https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_machine#Biological
- perfecthjrjth 4y agoYes, but with a twist: this giant machine worries about its future, its kids, its wealth, its financial assets.
- version_five 4y agoOr tricked into worrying about that as a control signal to perform its main task in service of its microorganism operators ;)
- jvanderbot 4y agoNobody in this thread has read Selfish Gene, apparently. That's the whole point of the book: That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves. In this context, species conflict is like fleets of world-ships fighting total war.
- ok_dad 4y agoThat’s an interesting SciFi idea: the real world is digital, and digital beings have created a physical world to fight battle via genetic biological machines, which are effectively concrete data structures.
- redanddead 4y agolike the scene in Jurassic park
- markdown 4y ago"It's a Unix system. I know this!"?
- theGnuMe 4y agoGenes are effectively biological computer programs.
- seqizz 4y agoReminded me: > Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. (Terence McKenna)
- adammarples 4y agoAnimals evolved long before plants. What's crazy is that plants were arguably evolved by fungi using alga to farm sunlight
- 11235813213455 4y ago> Animals evolved long before plants No underwater: algae 3500MY vs sponges, worms, shells 800MY-485MY out of water: plants 470MY vs millipedes, tetrapod 420MY-400MY
- OhNoNotAnother1 4y ago
- lilgreenland 4y agoquora says animals https://www.quora.com/Which-evolved-first-plants-or-animals https://www.quora.com/Which-evolved-first-plants-or-animals
- 11235813213455 4y agoAlgae existed long before animals And even on land, he seems to be wrong (or at least not up to date): https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/plant-life-on-earth-is-much-older-than-we-thought.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/plant-life..., https://www.science.org/content/article/land-plants-arose-earlier-thought-and-may-have-had-bigger-impact-evolution-animals https://www.science.org/content/article/land-plants-arose-ea...
- adammarples 4y ago
- foobarbecue 4y agoWe are all servants of the selfish gene.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoWell, we are biological machines that would not survive without a spectrum of microbes (e.g., gut bacteria). And to your point, kinda, I sometimes wonder if they exist for us, or we exist for them.
- sapiol 4y agoJust ask yourself, who was first?
- User23 4y agoAsimov did a story “Hostess” that’s kind of along those lines.
- tempe1h1 4y agothat whole nanomachines sci fi, e.g. nanobots making grey goo or whatever is not as exciting if you consider cells are alreay microbits made out of protein nanobots
- andrei_says_ 4y agoI recommend Stanislav Lem’s The Futurological Congress. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733473.The_Futurological_Congress https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733473.The_Futurological... Beyond fascinating
- OhNoNotAnother1 4y ago
- agumonkey 4y agoAFAIK fungi are extremely hard to get rid of. This is not a great news.
- BirAdam 4y agoThat depends upon just how much you’re willing to put yourself through. Compared to cancer, fungus is easy to be rid of.
- hnbad 4y agoYeah but that's because cancer is basically your own cells with faulty programming.
- 11235813213455 4y agothey don't like dryness, but unfortunately our body is wet
- etiam 4y agoVery diverse organism group, and often very tough, but at least it's distinct organisms with distinct characteristics rather than literally the same organism with some of the regulation broken. We have a few chemicals that hurt them while mostly sparing us, and more chemicals which hurt both but them more badly. Many species of fungus are quite sensitive to high temperatures, which may have been one selection pressure favoring warm-blooded animals. Maybe an artificial fever or even local tissue heating could be enough to tip the balance in favor of the host in some cases. At the very least it's a fascinating piece of information which is better to be in possession of than not.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoYep. 0. There aren't many antimycotics. 1. The extreme measures Mount Sinai needed to clean up after C. auris. (It has a 30% mortality rate.)
- hinkley 4y agoMany of the things that kill fungi also kill livers.
- zackees 4y ago
- Supermancho 4y agoMy introductory biology classes informed me well enough to understand that fungal infections can weaken the body's immune systems, weaken the tissue, or spread themselves over an inflamed area, with unfortunate side-effects of generating pro-growth local environments. Any of these may lead to an incidental increase in cancer growth. What's more, cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI, you wouldn't expect that cancer rates would be directly related to pre-existing fungal flora. I'm pretty sure dissected tumors have eliminated fungal infections as integral parts of many (if not most) cancers. If it's not integral, fungal is opportunistic and likely unavoidable for most cases. I expect that these conceptual models are what makes these kinds of studies difficult to prove.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago> cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI why do you say that?
- Supermancho 4y agoPrimarily because I don't remember the dates that coincided with the industrial revolution and mass production of cigarettes, alongside demonstrative analytics. I thought 100 years ago was a decent starting point for data. I do remember that the first major pandemic of lung cancer started in the 1920s and the first controlled study of Cigarettes involvement with Lung cancer started in the 1950s - Hill & Doll in the US. A parallel study was started in 1951 in Britain, which ended in 2001. Prior to that, cancer was routinely written up in case studies and submitted to journals as interesting medical cases.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoPerhaps infection disease killed people who would otherwise have grown a cancer, as your timing coincides with antibiotics adoption and technologies, I believe.
- chasil 4y agoCancer loves sugar. They generally disable the mitochondria and burn glucose in a much less efficient anaerobic process. Areas with malnutrition and lower life expectancy would not grow them very well.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThis reminds me of the brain maggot patient that walked in the ER. After being cleaned up, they died the next morning. Apparently the symbiosis was healthy albeit disgusting. Will be interesting if fungi end up slowing cancers and are actually fighting for the mycobiome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobiome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobiome
- djmips 4y agoFrom reading Snopes, they say that the patient was in an automobile accident and was taken to hospital. They were cleaned up but died 3 months later. No evidence of symbiosis that I can determine. I presume he got in the accident because of his deteriorating mental state.
- echelon 4y agoOne of my undergrad research projects involved growing agrobacterium [1], which is a type of bacteria that can induce a de-differentiated tumor tissue in plants. This mechanism is useful for the introduction of exogenous DNA. Tumor tissue can then be transferred to a different media to grow into a typical root system, carrying your new genes along. The bacteria essentially learned to signal to the plant which genes it needed to upregulate to produce the nutrients the bacteria wanted. It created an ideal environment for itself by tricking the host's genes. Biology has evolved all kinds of ways to manipulate life to its end goals of harnessing energy and reproducing. I wouldn't be surprised to learn if some fungi evolved to use mammalian cells to upregulate biochemical pathways for energy production. Nor would I be shocked if this had the side effect of causing those cells to become cancerous. [1] Side note : I've smelled a lot of different types of bacteria from growing them. E. coli is pretty neutral as far as bacterial smells go, but Agrobacterium has one of the strongest "foot"-like odors I've ever smelled. It's so distinctive.
- cookiengineer 4y agoYour comment reminded me of the Zombie ant fungus which is able to control the movements of ants...and makes them move to better environments that fit the growth requirements of the fungus. When it's done it uses its host to go as high up the forest as possible to find a better position to release its spores more effectively. What blew my mind was that some ant colonies have learned that the zombie fungi is susceptible to other fungi infections, which they use as kind of a defense mechanism against the zombie fungi infection. They quarantine infected zombie ants and put other fungi next to it because the zombie fungi otherwise leads to potential eradication of the colony due to it having such a huge spreading factor. That's why a lot of observed colonies in the tropical forests seem to harvest different types of fungi (for food and defense?). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
- dominotw 4y ago> many of the fungal species in question are widespread, which makes sample contamination a serious concern, says Iliev. > Both research teams got most of their tissue and blood samples from databases, so the samples were not collected with the aim of minimizing fungal contamination, says Bhatt. Although the researchers developed methods to filter any potential contaminants out of the sequencing data, she would like to see the results replicated using samples taken in a sterile environment. Uh what.
- Gatsky 4y agoYep… perhaps they should make sure the results aren’t total bogus before disseminating.
- jcampbell1 4y agoI think we need to credit the Swedish medical system here. They found that people who had taken oral Terbinafine (to treat toenail fungus) had a significantly lower mortality from prostate cancer. This has let to a bunch of studies where terbinafine has been added to cancer treatment with fantastic results.
- jcampbell1 4y agoI think we need to credit the Swedish medical system here. They found that people who had taken oral Terbinafine (to treat toenail fungus) had a significantly lower mortality from prostate cancer. This has let to a bunch of studies in Sweden where terbinafine has been added to cancer treatment with fantastic results. This work adds a plausible mechanism for the results.
- etiam 4y agoVery interesting. Are there any particular references you can recommend?
- connectsnk 4y agoReminds me of this doctor from Italy who claimed first that cancer and fungi have a close link and patients experience relief by a simple application of baking soda on the affected tumor. He was convicted of manslaughter for a patient who died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullio_Simoncini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullio_Simoncini