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from the Deep-into-that-darkness-peering dept.
Peering deep into the cellular universe: Allen Institute researchers map cell parts in 3D:
Our cells are built from smaller structures that specialize in the key tasks of life, from cell division to cellular trash collection. And how those smaller parts fit together in three dimensions can affect the health of cells and of the body.
Researchers at Seattle's Allen Institute for Cell Science and their colleagues have now developed a way to quantitatively map how these cellular components are arranged in space. Their approach, published in Nature, has the potential to be adapted broadly by scientists to investigate how cells operate.
The researchers analyzed more than 200,000 human stem cells at high resolution in three dimensions. They assessed the position of multiple internal structures, each visualized by a fluorescent label.
[...] The researchers found that some structures were always located in about the same place, whereas others showed more variability in their placement. They could measure how cellular organization shifted as cells entered cell division or otherwise changed state. And they could simulate cell transitions such as changes in the cytoskeleton that occur in cells at the edge of a cell colony. .
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday January 18 2023, @07:30AM (1 child)
A combination of priming, by use of the word 'Universe', and by the use of a font that does not distinguish between lower-case 'l' and capital 'I' meant that I read that as "Peering Deep Into the Cellular Universe: Alien Institute Researchers Map Cell Parts in 3D", and for a moment I was really interested.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday January 18 2023, @07:32AM
Actually, what I meant was "...having got used to fonts that do not distinguish between lower-case 'l' and upper-case 'I'...". The font rendered does make that distinction. Many used on the web don't,
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2023, @10:54AM (2 children)
To me it's interesting that as organisms grow larger they still use super long nerve cells instead of evolving a different faster method of getting signals from one end to the other end.
For example a large blue whale can have 25m long nerve cells (or longer). And these are still used for carrying signals. Not sure what the super long dinosaurs used - might have also been reliant on very long nerve cells ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-double-dinosaur-brain-myth-12155823/ [smithsonianmag.com] ).
Anyway it's good that scientists are figuring out more details about cells. I believe a fair number of cells actually think (many do engage it fairly complex behaviors), and if we better/fully understand how they do what they do it might help in other fields e.g. AI, medical.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday January 18 2023, @02:40PM (1 child)
It's quite difficult to evolve really new structures. Evolution is generally either "small steps" or "welcome to the graveyard". Even things that rarely work, generally start out by having small effects. Splitting chromosomes in half to increase the chromosome number is the largest change I can think of off hand that happens (and is successful) at all frequently. And that generally has almost no IMMEDIATE effects.
Conservation, though, needs continual reinforcement. Think of all the different species of cave fish that all went blind in different ways.
There are lots of really stupid things going on in our bodies, that only make sense as a sort of "make this small change needing that small adjustment" process. Consider the path of the nerve (I want to say vagus nerve, but that doesn't fit the images that a search showed me) that starts off at the brain, dives down through the thorax, wraps around a major blood vessel near the heart, and swing back up the neck to the vocal cords. Now consider that path in a giraffe. A good designer would just say "There's no reason for that to wrap around the blood vessel, have it go directly back up". Then small changes could optimize the path. But it made sense in a really small ancestor, and small changes couldn't fix the problem. Another one, less drastic, but more obvious, is food and breathing using the same pathway through the neck. That one probably goes back to before we split off from the insects.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday January 29 2023, @08:43PM
Another example is the failure of humans to make Vitamin C. Almost the whole metabolic pathway is intact, but the last step is missing in humans, so having done the majority of the work to make Vitamin C in the body, we then dispose of the precursor chemicals and rely on getting it in the diet instead. (Wikipedia:Vitamin C synthesis [wikipedia.org]).