Who's going to tell them about prions?
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Fucking prions. When I first learned about them in high school they really made me freak out. They are like the new game+ final boss of things fucking with things. Like how can they even infect other things, fucking mangled and misfolded looking ass, fuck them!
Definitely don’t think about the overpopulation of deer, the spread of CWD, the fact that deer are commonly found in corn fields, the US loves corn, and the plants can take up prions from the soil.
That interspecies barrier seems like it’s the only thing between us and a huge disaster.
Im glad barriers never break and we will be fine forever.
Prions don’t evolve, so in this case it’s mostly true.
Well, there are some theories of CWD causing Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Disease in unusually young patients and there are some concerns/doubts about the actual barrier believed to protect us, so that's fun.
Well isn't that neat!
Fun fact: i have several gallons of hard liqour at hand!
They're like an origami figure folded wrongly that causes any properly folded origami figures to become misfolded when it comes in contact with them.
One of the theories how organisms switched from RNA to DNA is due to viruses. Viruses have a pretty wild range of their genetic diversity. Single strand DNA, double strand DNA, positive sense single strand RNA, negative sense single strand RNA, double strand RNA. We’ve also probably got viruses as a permanent part of our genome from some ancestor species.
I think they’re pretty cool. Also, they do respond to outside stimuli, otherwise they’d be completely inert.
We’ve also probably got viruses as a permanent part of our genome from some ancestor species.
We definitely have viruses as a permanent part of our genome. A type of herpes virus is present in the DNA of all living things descended from bony fishes
Mammals wouldn't have a chorioallantoic placenta at all if not for a virus integrated into our genome. Mapping when in evolution the genes responsible for placental development first appeared was my first participation in scientific research, so I love this topic.
explain please
Happily! Basically, the true placenta we mammals (Eutheria) have is what allows such a long gestation period. Unlike our closely related marsupials, that quickly deplete their resources and must give birth, our placenta allows for a continuous exchange of nutrients. This involves a quite complicated process of embryonic tissue invading the uterine wall, so you can imagine the kind of immunological regulation that must be taking place for that to work.
So you'd assume we have several genes highly specific to our placenta that appear when we Eutherians first appeared... right? No! Turns out the vast majority already existed in jawed vertebrates (our common ancestor with sharks), then quite a lot show up in bony fish (our common ancestor with most things you call fish), and just one shows up in Tetrapoda (our common ancestor with amphibians).
So most of the framework for developing an organ such as the placenta already existed for millions of years, so what exactly was missing before it could finally show up in evolutionary history? The two genes that are absolutely required for this whole crazy "let's invade the mother's uterine wall tissue but NOT trigger her immune system" part: CSF2 and a group of closely related genes called syncitins.
Syncitins are the star here, because they're actually a gene that came from ancient retroviruses. In the virus, they were expressed in the envelope and controlled the fusion between the viral particle and the host cell. These viruses got integrated into our genome, and this "fusion with the host cell" mechanism became extremely useful and crucial for the placenta, basically allowing it to exist.
That is nuts and a really good explaination, thank you!
Thanks for talking about that, that's really cool!
I vaguely remember something about organelles inside a cell used to be seperate entities too
Mitochondria, for sure. They even still have their own DNA separate from your actual human DNA.
Can you send the paper? Please. 🥺
Also, they do respond to outside stimuli, otherwise they’d be completely inert.
Do they actually respond? Or is it the external stimuli responding to them?
They respond because they have to do things like inject the genetic material into the organism once it latches on to whatever on the cell surface. That doesn’t occur in the host, it occurs in the virus.
It’s been a while since I took virology, but I feel pretty confident that something occurs in the virus due to an external stimulus.
Viruses are nanomachines.
Change my mind.
Frankly, all life and life-adjacent things on this planet are either nanomachines or scalable nanomachines.
One might call those scaled up nanomachines "machines".
Never heard of it. Did you mean to say gigananomachines?
Pretty sure those "horrible little scalawags" play some pretty crucial roles in the human microbiome...
In the same way that the mafia plays a crucial role in the Italian ~~mafia~~ government. They’re still a bunch of dicks, even if they’re working for us. Move ‘em 2 millimeters in the wrong direction and you’ll have a bad time
Move ‘em 2 millimeters in the wrong direction and you’ll have a bad time
Are you referring to getting, I dunno, yogurt in places outside the digestive tract?
My understanding was that gut bacteria play a pretty crucial (beneficial) role in overall health, not to mention the whole gut-brain stuff.
Take some of those same bacteria and set them directly against the intestinal lining without any of the delicious mucus in the way and you’ll have a slightly unpleasant time. And I’m being literal. It’ll be aggravating, and deleterious to your long term health, but usually not immediately life threatening. They’re absolutely beneficial, but they’re in it for themselves. They’re not beneficent, they just are, which was all the point I intended to make.
“Go back to where you were born, go back to nothing, homunculus”