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New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

sciencemag.org

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Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#91

Post by sasaf5 »

Retric wrote: post #24
LinuxBender wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several companies and research groups are working on it. The challenge is a lack of priority, funding and even recognizing aging as a disease, at least in legal terms. Look up the Sens foundation (Dr. Aubrey De Grey), Dr. David Sinclair (Harvard .. Some are skeptical because he has started several companies) and Dr. Bruce Ames as starting points.

I think the real challenge is mind boggling complexity of interactions. Suggesting it’s a question of funding etc is vastly understating the actual issues. Curing cancer for example is a vastly simpler problem.

Not only simpler, curing cancer is also necessary for curing aging.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#92

Post by andreygrehov »

rosybox wrote: post #49
Dev_2019 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?

I recommend reading "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande to get a good sense of how hopeless "curing aging" is. Although that's not the focus of the book it does a wonderful job describing the challenge. The way it reads to me as a lay person, the body just falls apart. Things go wrong. It's not one thing going wrong, it's a very long list of disparate problems that ultimately aren't survivable. Aging isn't a losing battle…

I never read the book, but during the last couple years I became more attentive to things in life. Nothing special, but just the general flow of life so to speak. I started noticing an interesting pattern. There is pretty much always exists a single solution to any problem. A core solution. A polymorphism in programming could be an example of what I mean. Say you have a program with a bunch of similar entities and a ton of if/else statements handling the logic for various cases. Conditions keep growing with each new entity. The code becomes messy as you fight the language trying to "cure" your program. Then you introduce an interface and suddenly everything becomes more clear and things just _make sense_. Your conditionals slowly disappear, the logic gets simpler and the code is now flat.

I keep noticing similar patterns pretty much everywhere in life and somewhat confident that the same core solution exists for aging as well.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#93

Post by bigmit37 »

cwkoss wrote: post #8

Disclaimer: 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 "It has been tested in…

Wow. Didn’t know there was this whole subculture.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#94

Post by wjn0 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #86
q6467655 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate - I’ve always been fascinated hearing CS interpretations of biological processes.

DNA methylation acts as a form of error correction analogous to parity.

If genes are the data, then methylation is more like an additional piece of metadata directing the cell (potentially different across cells) how to use the data. One possible use for this metadata is potentially error correction, but it does much more than that.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#95

Post by gbrown »

perl4ever wrote: post #79
hprotagonist wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been doing biological/biomedical research for about 20 years now (god, that's a scary thought...) I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... : What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the…

I...doubt that's an accurate characterization, because the things that you are describing lead to fragile software. Biological systems are hard to understand and to modify, but maybe that's more due to redundancy that has evolved than to systems that are coupled like bad software systems. After all, if they broke like buggy software, we wouldn't have so many diseases to study; living things would just crash and stop.

The above should be taken as an evocative analogy for the complexity and senselessness - don't go too far trying to apply your intuition about designed/engineered systems (even really bad fragile ones) to biology.

The reason it's so crazy is that it's been evolving for billons of years - random mutations without one discernable iota of forethought or intention. The reason it works at all is that we're looking at the tiny fraction of accumulated changes that didn't die out. Evolution by natural selection builds crazy awesome, intricate things - just not sensibly engineered ones.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#96

Post by achillesheels »

andreygrehov wrote: post #92
rosybox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend reading "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande to get a good sense of how hopeless "curing aging" is. Although that's not the focus of the book it does a wonderful job describing the challenge. The way it reads to me as a lay person, the body just falls apart. Things go wrong. It's not one thing going wrong, it's a very long list of disparate problems that ultimately aren't survivable. Aging isn't a losing battle…

I never read the book, but during the last couple years I became more attentive to things in life. Nothing special, but just the general flow of life so to speak. I started noticing an interesting pattern. There is pretty much always exists a single solution to any problem. A core solution. A polymorphism in programming could be an example of what I mean. Say you have a program with a bunch of similar entities and a…

Shot in the dark (coming from a MS in Biomedical Engineering): circadian control to stabilize the body’s metabolic activity to lessen the “wear and tear” of the body’s condition to intensely survive for but a cosmic microsecond. Once we can “hack” ourselves to de-couple the body away from its heliocentric regularity, we can “slow aging”.

After all, ex vivo cellular immortality exists. I think it’s the hormones that ruin everything.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#98

Post by nydev »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #19

I 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

This 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.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#99

Post by shard »

achillesheels wrote: post #96
andreygrehov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never read the book, but during the last couple years I became more attentive to things in life. Nothing special, but just the general flow of life so to speak. I started noticing an interesting pattern. There is pretty much always exists a single solution to any problem. A core solution. A polymorphism in programming could be an example of what I mean. Say you have a program with a bunch of similar entities and a…

Shot in the dark (coming from a MS in Biomedical Engineering): circadian control to stabilize the body’s metabolic activity to lessen the “wear and tear” of the body’s condition to intensely survive for but a cosmic microsecond. Once we can “hack” ourselves to de-couple the body away from its heliocentric regularity, we can “slow aging”. After all, ex vivo cellular immortality exists. I think it’s the hormones that r…

That's interesting. I've always suspected that "curing" something as fundamental as aging would change some basic aspect of what makes us human. Per your comment about hormones, imagine that if you want immortality, you have to never have had testosterone or estrogen in your body. That person would have a vastly different human experience than everyone else. It sounds like it would make a pretty cool scifi story, as a matter of fact.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#100

Post by JohnBerea »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #86
q6467655 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate - I’ve always been fascinated hearing CS interpretations of biological processes.

DNA methylation acts as a form of error correction analogous to parity.

And alternate splicing is a form of compression, where exons store the repetitive parts of genes only once, to be combined to make many proteins.
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