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Medicine Science

Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found In the Human Digestive System (sciencealert.com) 47

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects. "It's insane," says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. "The more we look, the more crazy things we see." These mysterious bits of genetic material have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.

So Stanford University biologist Ivan Zheludev and colleagues argue their strange discovery may not be viruses at all, but instead an entirely new group of entities that may help bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses. "Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes," the researchers write in a preprint paper. Named after the highly-symmetrical, rod-like structures formed by its twisted lengths of RNA, the Obelisks' genetic sequences are only around 1,000 characters (nucleotides) in size. In fact, this brevity is likely one of the reasons we've failed to notice them previously.

In a study that has yet to be peer reviewed, Zheludev and team searched 5.4 million datasets of published genetic sequences and identified almost 30,000 different Obelisks. They appeared in about 10 percent of the human microbiomes the team examined. In one set of data, Obelisks turned up in 50 percent of the patients' oral samples. What's more, different types of Obelisks appear to be present in different areas of our bodies. "[This] supports the notion that Obelisks might include colonists of said human microbiomes," the researchers explain. They managed to isolate one type of host cell from our microbiome, the bacterium Streptococcus sanguinis -- a common human mouth microbe. The Obelisk in these microbes had a loop 1,137 nucleotides long. "While we don't know the 'hosts' of other Obelisks," write Zheludev and colleagues. "it is reasonable to assume that at least a fraction may be present in bacteria." The question of the Obelisks' source aside, all seem to include codes for a new class of protein the researchers have named Oblins.
Zheludev and team couldn't identify any impact of the Obelisks on their bacterial hosts, or a means by which they could spread between cells. "These elements might not even be 'viral' in nature and might more closely resemble 'RNA plasmids,'" they conclude.

This research appears in the preprint server bioRxiv.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found In the Human Digestive System

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @08:10AM (#64200168)

    I knew it.

  • bad link in article (Score:5, Informative)

    by clovis ( 4684 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @08:14AM (#64200182)

    Try this.
    https://www.sciencealert.com/o... [sciencealert.com]

  • by Smonster ( 2884001 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @08:15AM (#64200184)
    No peer reviewed. What is this, the Weekly World News? I know people want clicks, but seriously.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      1960's peer review is broken.

      Too many Type I and Type II errors and it's often anonymous and it's often unpaid and there's not much consequence for bad review and it often functions as narrative gatekeeping and reviewed papers are disproved at about a 50% rate (including fraud and plagiarism). Look at the $1T wasted on bogus Alzheimer's research or the Presidents of Stanford or Harvard. Total disaster.

      Eventually we'll get to distributed review with reputation scoring and the potential for neutral career r

      • by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @11:06AM (#64200696)

        I suggest that researchers should all post their papers on this site and let the resident armchair experts with mod points rate them appropriately.

        • That's kinda the way BioRxiv works.

          Preprint servers are useful for quickly disseminating normal research results.

          But for cold-fusion-level claims of a new form of life, perhaps it's better to wait for peer review.

          Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

          • > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

            I don't think the paper claims to have found a new form of life (a search for life turn up nothing).

            And what they're describing doesn't even seem that extraordinary considering all the weirdness and existing entities that may or may not be forms of life in biology.

            -IANAB

    • It's just like Windows Update. The end user is the the tester for Windows Updates. You're the peer now.

  • by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @08:19AM (#64200192)

    Sounds straight forward but any time there's mention of an obelisk you should always check for an asterisk (in case there are special conditions that apply) :-)

    • In this case the "NOT PEER REVIEWED" Asterix is much bigger than the Obelix.
      • by cellocgw ( 617879 ) <cellocgw&gmail,com> on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @11:45AM (#64200808) Journal

        In this case the "NOT PEER REVIEWED" Asterix is much bigger than the Obelix.

        Congrats: you just got whooshed. Clearly you are not a Gaulois.

        • At least me and my infinite Netflix queue don't get wooshed. Too bad I never have time to ever watch any of these things.

  • Queue those who will point to Covid shots 10...9...8...7..6...
  • Fragments? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @08:45AM (#64200228) Journal

    Are these just fragments of RNA from bacteria, human cells, viruses, that were destroyed and are now just floating around in specific bacteria in the gut? I think they need to find an actual mechanism in which these are produced or copy themselves to know they are anything but byproducts or random junk.

    The line at the very end of the article is most likely the case:

    "These elements might not even be 'viral' in nature and might more closely resemble 'RNA plasmids,'" they conclude.

    In other words they probably aren't a "new class of life".

    • by dargaud ( 518470 )
      Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. You take food full of DNA and RNA and partially digest it, you'll end up with pieces of *NA all over. Some might even be partly functional for a little while (like produce random proteins)... They'd have to prove it's coming from a different mechanism.
      • That would make them like nucleic acid dustbunnies? They may not be alive in the sense that they can reproduce, but it might seem that having all that good rich yummy chains of protein makin' could have possibilities. Got to be something in about how they combine.

        • That would make them like nucleic acid dustbunnies? They may not be alive in the sense that they can reproduce, but it might seem that having all that good rich yummy chains of protein makin' could have possibilities. Got to be something in about how they combine.

          Duuude. Like what if our spacetime isn't a simulator after all? Bro what if the universe is just God's Guts, and the primordial soup from which we evolved came from God breaking down other Realities he'd eaten? WHOAH-- it all makes sense now. Our physicists and cosmologists have struggled to understand the Big Bang and why it happened. But it's simple: the Big Bang was a literal time-release capsule God swallowed. It literally released TIME into the world; time is some kind of preternatural fiber + pre- and

    • Re:Fragments? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MilliMicro ( 6251190 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @12:06PM (#64200888)

      Are these just fragments of RNA from bacteria, human cells, viruses, that were destroyed and are now just floating around in specific bacteria in the gut?

      At a quick glance, they claim that these are fragments "with no evident homology to the NCBI BLAST (nt or nr) databases", and those databases are pretty comprehensive repositories of what we know. They've claimed that the genomes contain patterns indicative of genes/proteins, but that these and their predicted proteins mostly have no significant sequence or structural homology to anything we know. Some predicted proteins have tertiary structures which hint that they might have ribozyme activity, which suggests a replicative process similar to some viroids. So no, it looks like they've confidently ruled out that this is RNA from the host or microbiota, but it looks like they're still missing definitive proof that obelisks are some sort of new reproducing genetic element.

      • I wonder if these might be more like secreted enzymes but RNA rather than protein? They could be very interesting and not be distinct biota. It'd be more exciting if they were, but even being more mundane intentionally secreted nucleotides could have lots of novel applications.
    • A lot of intracellular organelles are just bacteria that no longer need any of the genes to live independently. I think it's important to find out what they are and what they came from, but the best guess we have is still their speculation. Essentially the running theory is that these are viruses that predate the ones that can build their own protein defenses. So these might be independent and older virus-like entities, or it could be a virus that has shed a lot of its genetic material that it doesn't ne

    • This is a bigger deal. Have you ever researched evolution? This basically confirms a hypothesis, namely -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      This is a big deal, this fills in gaps of the story of life.

  • Just what I want my doctor to tell me after a colonoscopy.

  • Biologists don't consider viruses to be "life".

    Let alone fragments of organic molecules.

    • "Life" is a label. It is a matter of definition. What is the difference if it is life or not? I would say not. But if they do what the article claims they do, it is still interesting and could be useful to know.
    • I don't think that's really the majority opinion anymore. Back when I was in school that was described as an out of date opinion, and that was quite a while ago now...
  • by Joey Vegetables ( 686525 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @10:19AM (#64200578) Journal
    I find entirely new classes of life in my refrigerator every time I clean it.
  • Why would we consider something apparently a lot like plasmids -- yet shorter to be life? Someone must desperately need research funding to be throwing out phrases like "New Form of Life".
    • Right, these would presumably need to be demonstrated to be independent in some way. Otherwise they're probably not even really parasites or symbiotes but just a part of bacteria that gets excreted to be used.
  • "Named after the highly-symmetrical, rod-like structures formed by its twisted lengths of RNA, "

    Sure, we know you're just making a 2001 A Space Odyssey reference.
  • Then the obvious delivery service would, of course, be Obelix. And a helper would be Asterix....

  • Is they say they don't even know what the source of these are. That suggests that they haven't done their homework. I like to see a mechanism or a full explanation They should have said, "Hey, this is new".

    The stupid journalists/scientists will try and 'cry wolf' to get attention, but instead, its a theory. If you don't know where it comes from and don't know if it's replicating on it's own, then it's not life. I don't remember much of the definitions, but I'm pretty sure it has to replicate to be life.

    Ther
  • >"Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found"

    Many (including me) would argue that viruses are not "alive" or represent "life". So it is pretty big stretch to call some things that are even less meaningful than viruses, as a new "class of life."

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