The team studied the familiar roundworm or C. elegans to see what the tiny bubbles do, good or bad, and guess what?:
Cells share good news and bad news with each other, and one way in which they do that is through tiny bubbles called extracellular vesicles (EVs). Once considered to be cellular debris, EVs carry beneficial or toxic cargo that promotes good health or disease. In the human brain, for example, EVs carry disease-causing proteins that may influence the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Although EVs are of profound medical importance, the field lacks a basic understanding of how EVs form, what cargo is packaged in different types of EVs originating from same or different cell types and how different cargos influence the range of EV targeting and bioactivities,” said lead author Inna Nikonorova, a postdoctoral researcher.
EVs, which are found in human fluids including urine and blood, may be used in liquid biopsies as biomarkers for disease because healthy and sick cells package different EV cargo.
Rutgers University, “Once called cellular debris, tiny bubbles may play key role in understanding, treating diseases” at ScienceDaily (March 24, 2022)
It’s getting harder all the time to find genuine junk in the human body. Just as well that Nathan Lents, author of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, probably isn’t listening.
The paper is open access.
You may also wish to read: New use for “junk DNA”: Controlling fear Okay, why, until recently, did researchers think that “the majority of our genes were made up of junk DNA, which essentially didn’t do anything”? Because that vast sunken library of dead information (sheer randomness and waste) was a slam dunk for Darwinism, as politically powerful theistic evolutionist Francis Collins was quick to point out in The Language of God. (2007). If that’s not true, an argument for Darwinism is disconfirmed.