- It can have less than many of the other sciences, but biology has a dozen “rules” – road generalizations on behavior or nature and evolution.
- From now on, USC researchers wish to add a new rule called “advantageous selective instability (SAI)”, which explores how instability can really benefit a cell and a cellular body.
- The setback of this “rule” is that SAI can also be a key factor for things like illness and aging, so understanding this process could help explore these biological processes.
Through science, rules and laws help us to understand the world around us, whether applied to cosmic scales or to the subatomic. However, in the organic world, things are a little more complicated. This is because nature is often complete biological exceptions, and therefore “rules of biologyAlso considered to be large generalizations rather than absolute facts that explain and govern any known life.
Some of these great generalizations include things like Allen’s law, which dictates that body shapes in endotherms (hot blood animals) adapt to climatic conditions – form and stocky help keep heat in cold climates, while large and disgusting helps dissipate heat in the hottest. Another “law”, known as the reign of Bergmann, declares that the species of a largely distributed clade tend to be larger in colder and smaller climates in hottest (although of course, as with most biological rules, Exceptions apply).
A few Two dozen rules currently exist Who describe all kinds of natural world processes, and now researchers like the University of Southern California (USC) hope to add a new rule. At first glance, this new rule – called “advantageous selective instability” or Sai – seems to challenge the underlying hypotheses of life In general, and pushes against the current hypothesis that life has stability and resource conservation.
While nature tends towards stability (this is one of the reasons why we see so many hexagonal forms in nature, including bee nests and insect eyes), the USC molecular biologist, John Towers, maintains that instability in biological components such as proteins and genes can be useful to cells. The study was published last week in the journal Borders in aging.
“Even the simplest cells contain proteases and nucleases and degrade regularly and replace their proteins and RNA, indicating that Sai is essential to life,” said Tower in a press statement. “This can promote maintenance of both embarrassed And a gene mutation in the same cellular population, if the normal gene is favorable in a cellular state and the mutation of the gene is favorable in the other cellular state. »»
These states allow greater genetic diversity, which can in turn make organisms more adaptable. Many cellular components service a short lifespan, because it actually helps to promote cell health. This indicates that Sai in these components is a necessary biological function.
Of course, there are a lot of drawbacks to instability. This process of mutation instability required of energy can introduce deleterious cells which contribute to agingwhile inducing other types of damage and dysfunction.
“Aging has proven to be difficult to define, but most definitions include an increased risk of death with age and a decrease in reproductive form with age,” said the document. “Sai can create a cost for the replicator in terms of energy and / or materials, and this cost can be interpreted in terms of promoting aging. »»
Another element of evidence supporting the omnipresence of Sai and its candidacy as a new “biology rule” is that it develops in other well -known concepts, especially Chaos Theory and ideas of “cell conscience”. For this reason, as well as its links with fundamental biological processes such as aging, understanding the internal functioning of Sai could help biologists explore cell life in a whole new way.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat and writes / modifies science fiction and the functioning of our world. You can find your previous things in Gizmodo and paste if you look strong enough.