Queen of Decay

The January 2009 issue of Science has an article about Osedax, an annelid worm with help from Oceanospirillales bacteria, feeds on the bones of whales. 

It notes how the male worms are parasitic on females and "thus fertilization is guaranteed." 

The females from a swimming trochophore [A trochophore is a type of free-swimming planktonic marine larva with several bands of cilia] only occurs when the larvae encounter a carcass and have been infected with the endosymbiont. 

Interestingly enough there is an article in the December 2008 edition of National Geographics about Pilosaurs, that were big as school buses and looks like precursors to whales. They lived in the Jurassic Period, were 50-feet-long and found 400 million miles from Norway's Coast. I would bet that Oceanospirillales feasted on these and had plenty of time to diversify to adjust around the world. 

FoldIt and Education

The January 2009 edition of Science Magazine chronicles Steven Pletsch who, with his infant daughter in his lap, learned the protein folding game Foldit, helped team of university graduate students win a biochemistry competition. 

Pletsch spent up to 30 hours a week with the game learning the fundamentals of protein folding. He has no background or degree and is a self-taught designer of low-voltage electrical devices. 

Once again, the non-college educated has more insight than the mass trained.

lincRNAs Discovered in Genome

A new study finds about 1,600 known highly conserved, long RNAs with important regulatory roles in the mammlian genome. These are non-protein coding genes that produce "large intervening non-coding RNAs or lincRNAs." 

[There functions include the] regulate a variety of different cellular processes, including cell proliferation, immune surveillance, maintenance of embryonic stem cell pluripotency, neuronal and muscle development, and gametogenesis.

This is in contrast to the nearly 20,000 protein encoding genes. This will add to the classic examples of RNA such as microRNAs. 

People Don't Respect Herpes

'“Mono probably doesn’t have the respect it deserves,” said Dr. Robert Frenck..“It is a significant disease in the U.S., and people trivialize it,” [Dr. Joseph Pagano] said.' 95 percent of people become infected with Epstein-Barr, the herpes virus that causes mononucleosis. Spytoms include "fatigue, fever, sore throats, swollen glands and an enlarged spleen...[even] serious complications in transplant patients or those with weakened immune systems."

Overuse of Sleeping Pills

The use of sleeping pills has tripled in use amongst those of college-age, "rising from 599 users per 100,000 in 1998 to 1,524 users per 100,000 in 2006. Dr. Eric M. Plakun ...said the increasing reliance on sleeping pills reflects changes in cultural attitudes toward medication use."

This is a generation that was raised on Ritalin and Adderall," Dr. Plakun said. "They and their parents have turned to medication and found medications can be helpful. But it’s a double-edged sword. You pay a price in which taking a pill becomes the way to go.

Ritalin (methylphenidate) is used to treat ADHD, narcolepsy, daytime fatigue. It was patented in 1954. It is a central nervous stimulant produced by Novartis.

Novartis has about 18 small molecule drugs on the market.

Study links water pollution with declining male fertility

More medicine and hormones in our tap water. New research by Dr Susan Jobling at Brunel University and the University of Exeter has shown how "female sex hormones (estrogens), and chemicals that mimic estrogens, are leading to ‘feminisation’ of male fish."

“We have been working intensively in this field for over ten years. The new research findings ... effects seen in wild fish and in humans are caused by similar combinations of chemicals. We have identified a new group of chemicals in our study on fish, but do not know where they are coming from.”

'Professor Charles Tyler of the University of Exeter said: ”Our research shows that a much wider range of chemicals than we previously thought is leading to hormone disruption in fish. This means that the pollutants causing these problems are likely to be coming from a wide variety of sources. Our findings also strengthen the argument for the cocktail of chemicals in our water leading to hormone disruption in fish, and contributing to the rise in male reproductive problems. There are likely to be many reasons behind the rise in male fertility problems in humans, but these findings could reveal one, previously unknown, factor.”'

Our microbes, ourselves

It is becoming very clear that obesity is not caused by the weak-willed or McDonalds per say. It is becoming more clear that hormones and genetic predisposition is far more important. Take for instance gut microbes, that may well be the lead actor telling the person what to eat.

A new article notes that there is a "link between differing microbial populations in the human gut and body weight among three distinct groups: normal weight individuals, those who have undergone gastric bypass surgery, and patients suffering the condition of morbid obesity..."

What is living in your gut may well be dictating what you feel like eating.

Dr. John DiBaise, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic, Arizona, Bruce Rittmann, Ph.D., an environmental engineer and a member of National Academy of Engineering, Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering all worked on this study.

The team look at 16S rRNA, molecular structure which provides a characteristic fingerprint for microbial identification.
The team used:
454-pyrosequencing, which allows a significantly larger number and greater diversity of gut microbia to be identified.

"The resulting composition of gut microbiota in the three gastric bypass patients differed substantially...the microbial populations extracted from obese individuals were high in a particular microbial subgroup, hydrogen-producing bacteria known as prevotellaceae."

"Further, such hydrogen producers appear to coexist with hydrogen-consuming methanogens, found in abundance in obese patients, but absent in both normal weight and gastric bypass samples."

This is really amazing. This means that a certain bacteria appears only when you are obese. Not when you are not, or not any more.


"Organisms producing hydrogen and acetate create a situation like cars flooding onto the highway. The methanogens, which remove the hydrogen, are like the offramps, allowing the hydrogen cars to get off. That allows more acetate cars to get on, because some hydrogen cars are coming off the highway."

The bacteria that consumes the hydrogen and acetate are present only in the overweight. So that must mean that hydrogen and acetate must exist, and that the bacteria that consume it causes, via by their presence or by-product, the obesity.

Here is where is gets interesting.

"The methanogen offramps, by removing hydrogen, accelerate the efficient fermentation of otherwise indigestible plant polysaccharides and carbohydrates. The effect is to boost production of SCFAs, particularly acetate, which will be taken up by the intestinal epithelium and converted to fat. The result over time may be increasing weight, eventually leading to obesity."