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The World's Deadliest Thing

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Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#21

Post by aerostable_slug »

croes wrote: post #17
sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

Is there a theory for what purpose the Botulinum Toxin evolved for? I don't see that paralyzing your host is particularly useful for a bacterium.

Evolution doesn't need purpose. As long as a feature doesn't reduce the survival rate, it remains in place. The toxicity could just be a side effect of the spores durability and longevity.

Exactly. See also, cats & sweet flavors:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=476655...

A defective gene resulted in No Big Deal to a very successful class of animals.

Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#22

Post by CobrastanJorji »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

Is there a theory for what purpose the Botulinum Toxin evolved for? I don't see that paralyzing your host is particularly useful for a bacterium.

I'm in no way a scientist, but it sounds like the bacteria grows best in oxygen-free, low acidity environments with a lot of protein: that's dead things. Paralyzing your host is a bad idea for diseases that will be permanently destroyed shortly after their host dies, but it's a pretty great plan if it creates a wonderful ecosystem free of pesky immune cells and oxygen for you to grow and produce spores that can happily sit around forever waiting for something to eat them.

Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#23

Post by lkrubner »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

Is there a theory for what purpose the Botulinum Toxin evolved for? I don't see that paralyzing your host is particularly useful for a bacterium.

A pathogen's needs will, over time, converge with the needs of its host, but only if the pathogen is only able to survive in one species. When a pathogen is able to feed off of many species, its needs never converge with the needs of any particular host.

Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#25

Post by bambax »

> a disease that had been coined Botulism, after bolutus, the Latin for sausage

[typo] If the author is reading, sausage in Latin is botellus, or sometimes botulus, but not bolutus.

Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#26

Post by sho »

> The lethal dose when consumed orally is around 30 billionths of a gram, which if you want a relatable comparison, is about the same as if you cut a single poppy seed into ten thousand equal pieces and ate one of them. It is an amount so tiny, it really doesn’t make sense.

That's right - it makes no sense. How could such a small amount of anything do enough damage to shut down your entire body? According to wikipedia, it works by "cleaving key proteins required for nerve activation". Unless there's some self-replication mechanism, how does that even work?

edit: I went and did the math. At an LD of 30 nanograms, that's about 1.2 billion actual molecules of this stuff to die. I guess that's enough to shut down a sufficient number of nerves that you just can't function anymore.

The math: lethal dose / per molecule weight (molar mass / avogadro)

(3.0e-10) / (149323.05 / 6.0221409e+23) = 1209888406.377984

Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#27

Post by cgio »

The rapid, long-lasting and highly noticeable cosmetic effects made Botox a near instant success. In small doses, the same nerve damage that causes fatal paralysis in poisoning cases, helps to remove forehead creases and crow’s feet, with the only side effects being an inability to express emotion using your face,

…

ironic that many celebrities who publicly advocated a clean living, chemical-free lifestyle, were also early adopters of a treatment that involves injecting the deadliest substance on earth into your face (looking at you, Paltrow). If any of them were surprised at this seeming paradox, they certainly didn’t show it.

Loved the subtle irony here.

Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#29

Post by catlikesshrimp »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

Is there a theory for what purpose the Botulinum Toxin evolved for? I don't see that paralyzing your host is particularly useful for a bacterium.

I can't answer your question for C Botulinum. But many times we are just in the middle of warfare. That is, it is an accident we are harmed.

For instance, Corynebacterium Diphtheriae is not lethal per se, but then comes a virus that infects the bacteria, and kills the bacteria, and a byproduct of the virus causes the bacteria to cause diphteria. The phage (the bacteria virus) provides no advantage to C diphteriae.

My hypothesis for clostridiums, that includes C botulinum, is that they do want to kill their host, however. They kind of kill the planet they live in as they can thrive in the carcass while it lasts. So, deathly clostridiums have this at least short term advantage over non deathly ones.

C. tetani, perfrigens, botulinum and difficile can all kill you. However, C. perfrigens does it differently, by diggesting you before killing you, "on the fly" or "just in time"

Re: The World's Deadliest Thing

#30

Post by Borrible »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

Is there a theory for what purpose the Botulinum Toxin evolved for? I don't see that paralyzing your host is particularly useful for a bacterium.

It comes in handy for organisms that happen to like feasting on decaying bodies through saprophytic nutrition.

Paralysis enhances the chance of dying.

Being anaerobic limits their expansion.

Thanks to the Great Oxidation Event, cyanobacteria caused.

By the way, often humans and other multicellular Organisms are just battleground or collateral damage in billion year old wars between bacteria and/or viruses.

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