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.
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.
Midichlorians exists! (Score:4, Funny)
I knew it.
Re:Midichlorians exists! (Score:4, Insightful)
They're still shite.
bad link in article (Score:5, Informative)
Try this.
https://www.sciencealert.com/o... [sciencealert.com]
No peer review,. (Score:3)
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
Re:No peer review,. (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest that researchers should all post their papers on this site and let the resident armchair experts with mod points rate them appropriately.
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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.
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> 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
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It's just like Windows Update. The end user is the the tester for Windows Updates. You're the peer now.
Special conditions apply (Score:5, Funny)
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) :-)
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Re:Special conditions apply (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I should watch it to convince myself to read it. Much lower commitment level and easier entry point. Even if the original is the better version, I rarely go straight to the source first. Same with tools, really. If I buy a tool I may never need again, I'll buy it at Harbor Freight (US chain known for selling cheap and low quality tools). I know it won't be very good, but the things that are wrong with the inferior version help me know what to look for in a good one.
New Class of Life (Score:1, Troll)
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Queue those who will point to Covid shots 10...9...8...7..6...
See also: the very next post.
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Funny how many anti-virus COVID deniers died of COVID.
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Fuck around. Find out.
as a non-yank, this sounds like some kind of WWE slogan, and its cringe as fuck.
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Funny how new discoveries come after old ones. But get off Slashdot if you're going to think that mRNA is going to modify your DNA. I'm not saying you're not a true Scotsman. I'm just saying it's not worth the effort.
Fragments? (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
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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.
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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)
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.
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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
Re: Fragments? (Score:2)
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.
Great (Score:2)
Just what I want my doctor to tell me after a colonoscopy.
AIUI (Score:2)
Biologists don't consider viruses to be "life".
Let alone fragments of organic molecules.
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That's nothing. (Score:5, Funny)
We don't consider plasmids life ... (Score:2)
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2001 (Score:2)
Sure, we know you're just making a 2001 A Space Odyssey reference.
Should of named it Menhir (Score:2)
Then the obvious delivery service would, of course, be Obelix. And a helper would be Asterix....
What's not clear (Score:2)
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
Life? (Score:2)
>"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."