Researchers: Importantly, we show that some archaeal histone variants are ancient and have been maintained as distinct units for hundreds of millions of years. Our work suggests that complex combinatorial chromatin that uses histones as its building blocks exists outside eukaryotes and that the ancestor of eukaryotes might have already had complex chromatin.
Cell biology
A protein informs cells that they should stick together
Move along, folks. No design to see here.
Bacteria “convince” their squid host to change gene expression to make life easier for the bacteria
Clever little things, aren’t they? Change the host’s genome? So much intelligence in nature and it is supposedly all just an accident. Sure.
Not-yet-specialized cells seem to know where to go
Researchers: Tohoku University scientists have, for the first time, provided experimental evidence that cell stickiness helps them stay sorted within correct compartments during development. How tightly cells clump together, known as cell adhesion, appears to be enabled by a protein better known for its role in the immune system.
Muscle fibers resemble entire tissues with many nuclei
Researcher: “Due to the heterogeneity of its nuclei, a single muscle cell can act almost like a tissue, which consists of a variety of very different cell types,” explains Dr. Minchul Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in Birchmeier’s team and one of the two lead authors of the study. “This enables the cell to fulfill its numerous tasks, like communicating with neurons or producing certain muscle proteins.”
Cells activate individual quality control responses
Researcher: “Integrated stress response is like a city going through full lockdown,” Yan said. “If you only have 10 cases, you don’t want to come out and tell the city, ‘Let’s just hunker down and not do anything,’ or shut down all the productivity. You want the city to have a system to evaluate the severity of the stress — and to deal with it according to its severity.
New theory suggests that giant viruses created the cell nucleus
Wilcox: Growing evidence has persuaded some researchers, however, that the nucleus might have arisen through a symbiotic partnership much like the one believed to have produced mitochondria.
A rethink about how cells organize themselves?
At Knowable: Over the last decade, cell biologists have come to appreciate what many believe to be a whole new way that cells shape their internal landscape.
Bacterium alters its genome to adapt to new conditions
Researchers: Achromatium is special in many respects: It is 30,000 times larger than its “normal” counterparts that live in water and owing to its calcite deposits it is visible to the naked eye. It has several hundred chromosomes, which are most likely not identical. This makes Achromatium the only known bacterium with several different genomes.
Cells ordered to commit suicide don’t necessarily die
Isn’t that remarkable? The phenomenon that enables cells to avoid committing suicide when “ordered” to do so (apoptosis) is so old that it goes back to the common ancestor of flies and mice. How much time was there for such a complex system to evolve purely randomly, as in a Darwinian scheme?
The philosopher and the biologist offer a “fantasy” of how Darwinism can create minds
The problem isn’t with their believing that cells feature lots of intelligence but with their effort to equate human and cellular intelligence. Human intelligence is something quite different.
First cell with a mitochondrion was already complex
Already complex? No intermediate forms? Where have we heard that before?
If we need AlphaFold to figure out protein folding, how likely is protein folding to be a product of mere chance?
We are told by many philosophers that life came to exist on Earth purely by chance. How likely is that, given the intricacy of the machinery that governs our bodies, such that someone needs to design AlphaFold to figure it out?
Lipid droplets are not just useless fat
It’s getting hard to be a vestigial organ these days. It turns out that just about everything has a job.
Global webinar, October 21, 2020, with Michael Denton on Miracle of the Cell
Denton: “fine-tuning is far, far, far more intricate, exacting, and interdependent than we could have expected. It’s more exacting than we know even today.”