ah yes the mitochondria ... the powerhouse of the cell. thanks Ms Jeffers 7th grade bio
Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
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Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#222Something I thought was just an internet tale: mitochondria are close descendants of bacteria, and so taking antibiotics will potentially harm them. But turns out this is actually rooted in science ...
Be very careful when stating this kind of thing. It's extremely easy for people that already have a hard time understanding science and medicine to take this as evidence to support their anti science and anti vaccine/medicine.
Different antibiotics target different cellular mechanisms depending on what the microorganism is. And almost none of them target the mitochondria at all.
Yes the common hypothesis is that mitochondria were originally a symbiotic separate organism that joined the cells that eventually became the origin of most complex life.
Remember that if that's what happened, it was over 3 billion years ago. After that immense amount of time, mitochondria aren't really separate organisms anymore. They're deeply entwined into every complex organism in the world. Very unlikely for common antibiotics to have any effect on them at all.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#223I don't know if I can buy this explanation. Sleep is dangerous (and not just to night drivers). You're basically in a several-hours-long coma where a smilodon can come along and eat you without any trouble. So long as cells have more than one mitochondria each, staging them so they don't all need sleep simultaneously seems like a total no-brainer, and doesn't require any difficult-to-manage circumstances that leave you unconscious as predator snacks. This is a big deal, there's more than enough evolutionary pressure for sleep to have been selected out of the genome hundreds of millions of years ago.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#224The paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09261-y Not an expert in this area, but the essay feels a bit like an oversimplification. Not only is this in flies, but I wasn't entirely convinced this isn't about rest rather than sleep per se. It's a cool paper, interesting to read and read about, but my hunch is there's more steps in the chain, and am not sure it will replicate in humans or even mamma…
It is an awful paper and I am a very expert in this area. This is science, alas.
Huh, you actually are an expert in this area. I’m curious to hear more too.
> There, I studied the early stages of neuronal development in the Drosophila embryo… > I graduated with my Ph.D. in September 2006 and decided that I would continue my research activity on sleep, using flies as the animal model.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#225Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
a completely unnecessary interjection "might have been answered" is absolutely valid: the correct theory might have been produced
On the contrary, this is such a common misunderstanding that it practically defines the meme of pop science. Proposal of a hypothesis is not answering. Even if, decades from now and after many additional studies, scientific consensus settles on this hypothesis as "the answer", the first paper to speculate about the idea is still just a speculation. Moreover, if you're an outsider, the speculation is often an idea tha…
It sounds like you're just dead set on defending the rude way of dismissing someone's comment? "Might just have been answered" is a completely valid description of what happened: the correct hypothesis might have been produced. It is obvious to anyone that it still requires verification; producing an answer is not the same as proving it beyond a shadow of doubt, and no one said it was. You're pretending to debate some philosophy of science but actually are playing pedantic word games to sound smart or gatekeep or something.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it is true that Guiness stopped keeping track of records of staying awake for health reasons, people with severe sleep deprivation ends up being psychotic and admitted to psychiatric care and administered sleep inducing drugs. So, lack of sleep is not something you die from short term. Long term (years, decades) short sleep is associated with higher all cause mortality risk though.
there's this prion disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia
And there is the hereditary version: fatal familial insomnia [FFI]) stemming from a mutation in the PRNP gene.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would make sense if there was a monocausal explanation of why ancient ancestors started sleeping, but then other body functions started making use of the sleeping system since it was at hand.
> why ancient ancestors started sleeping I tend to believe that our ancestors didn't start sleeping, they started waking up ! the default pattern is sleep and conservation of energy, but you need to wake up to expend more energy for a short period in order to feed yourself efficiently
Yeah. Perhaps animals are the first organisms that developed the ability to be awake, not the first that developed the ability to sleep.
By the way, even Cnidaria (jellyfish etc) exhibit sleep-wake cycles [1]. They don't have a brain, but they do have a nervous system. Maybe the first animal with nervous system (a common ancestor of Cnidaria and Bilateria) was the first to have a sleep-wake cycle.
I don't understand the current research on mitochondria, but it sounds as if sleep has to do with how neurons work.
1: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-62723-1_...
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you need oxygen, then you need sleep! Do plants sleep? Don't some insects, like flies, live without any sleep?
No, plants don't sleep, and neither do fungi or single celled organisms. Sleep seems to be a property specifically of animals.
Some plants do change to a "night" configuration though (closing leaves or petals, etc). Not sure if you could call it sleep.