[HN Gopher] Bacteria store memories and pass them on for generat...
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Bacteria store memories and pass them on for generations
Author : geox
Score : 231 points
Date : 2023-11-22 00:20 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.utexas.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.utexas.edu)
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Researchers discover a single dimension of measurement of iron--
| in low, "balanced," and high levels of concentration--persist
| behavior for several generations, disappearing by the seventh.
| nightfly wrote:
| So bacteria store data on magnetic tape, heh
| tomohelix wrote:
| Here is the preprint and free version:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10441380/
| molticrystal wrote:
| Along similar lines of interesting memory studies of simpler
| lifeforms, there is an article titled "These Decapitated Worms
| Regrow Old Memories Along with New Heads"[0] and study [1] which
| can alter your assumptions on how and where memories are stored
| and retrieved.
|
| Also there were claims starting in the 50s where planarians were
| taught a maze or to respond to certain stimuli and then fed to
| other planarians and that the trait would sometimes transfer as
| well. I don't know if any of those studies were reproduced, thus
| the claims might be dubious, but it would be interesting if they
| were true.
|
| [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-
| decapita...
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13881412/
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > alter your assumptions on how and where memories are stored
| and retrieved
|
| I remember reading an anecdote about a baby who didn't like
| being held by their father, who happened to beat the baby's
| mother during pregnancy. No idea of the veracity of the story
| but something about it had me thinking similarly about
| "instincts" and where they come from. The meaning of the word
| does seem to be a lot like memories that are "passed on for
| generations".
| simonh wrote:
| In late stage pregnancy babies in the womb can hear voices,
| and can often identify their father after birth by their
| voice immediately after birth. Violence often includes a lot
| of shouting, and physiological stress on the victim which
| would affect the baby. I'm guessing the baby learned to
| associate these.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| n=1, but I sang to both my daughters in the womb (different
| songs) and after they were born singing "their" song would
| calm them down a lot faster. I don't think this is as much
| "instincts" as it is "very early experiences".
| moehm wrote:
| Make it n=2.
| jl6 wrote:
| Babies develop a preference for their primary caregiver, who
| is usually the mother.
|
| Young children generally are more cautious around men than
| women, which is probably good risk management. Instinctive?
| Possibly.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > probably good risk management
|
| Is it, though? This data [0] says otherwise.
|
| [0]: http://www.breakingthescience.org/SimplifiedDataFromDH
| HS.php
| thegiogi wrote:
| Did they start collecting data 100k years ago? Cause that
| is the timescale for this stuff no?
| dotancohen wrote:
| This is an extraordinarily important point to make,
| especially in light of the GP comment and the perception
| that it reflects.
| jl6 wrote:
| That's one very specific type of risk, and a thankfully
| rare one. (That also appears to be a men's rights
| activist site with an axe to grind on this subject).
|
| A more neutral source:
|
| https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
|
| ... which suggests the opposite (but there's not much in
| it).
|
| In terms of broader risks, males commit a clear majority
| of violent offences and a vast majority of sexual
| offences.
|
| This isn't even just a human thing. Male primates (and
| mammals generally) exhibit more aggressive behavior than
| females. It's probably a deep consequence of anisogamous
| sexual differentiation:
|
| https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-
| evolution/fulltext/S0169...
| 0134340 wrote:
| >Also there were claims starting in the 50s where planarians
| were taught a maze or to respond to certain stimuli and then
| fed to other planarians and that the trait would sometimes
| transfer as well
|
| So superpowers were transferred when ate? Kirby devs were on to
| something.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Genes can transfer between species, so I don't see why this
| wouldn't be possible.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
| tetris11 wrote:
| That's typically through parasitic/grafting/symbiotic
| relationships, and even that takes a few half millienia of
| repeated symbiosis and selective pressures to take. What's
| being described here is much faster and much more immediate.
| culi wrote:
| In micro-organisms, HGT happens in a very short timeframe.
| In fact, some soil fungi have been observed to somehow
| purposely increase their rates of HGT when put in a new and
| stressful environment. Borrowing genes from entire other
| domains of life like bacteria or archaea. Also study after
| study keeps showing that rates of HGT in complex
| multicellular species like fish[0][1] and even humans.[2]
| I'm not trying to be sensational (and generally agree it's
| likely not that relevant to the current discussion) but one
| thing that's clear from our consistent underestimation of
| the prevalence of HGT is that there's still a lot more to
| it than we currently understand
|
| [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/dna-jumps-between-
| animal-spec...
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep18676
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5379729/
| tetris11 wrote:
| thanks for the extra material!
| selcuka wrote:
| Not only simpler lifeforms. Cases with humans that may indicate
| a memory transfer after organ transplants are also documented:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
|
| > The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by
| recipients following heart transplantation is hypothesized to
| occur via the transfer of cellular memory
|
| http://www.namahjournal.com/doc/Actual/Memory-transference-i...
|
| > There have been perplexing reports of organ transplant
| receivers claiming that they seem to have inherited the memory,
| experiences and emotions of their deceased donors, and which
| are causing quirky changes in their personality.
| NL807 wrote:
| Yeah, find these highly dubious. A heart transplant is quite
| a traumatic event, both physically and emotionally, who knows
| what side effects the patients were experiencing after the
| procedure.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes but the heart contains a lot of neurons so it's an
| interesting theory.
| culi wrote:
| Over half of all neurotransmitters, including 80-95% of
| seratonin, originates in the gut. I wouldn't be surprised
| to hear a microbiome-based theory of personality but
| cellular memory is a new one to me
|
| Possibly related: it turns out horizontal gene transfer
| is way more common in humans than we could expect and we
| really don't have a good explanation for how it's
| happening
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5379729/
| hollerith wrote:
| Over half of all neurotransmitters originates in the gut,
| but the barrier preventing the entry of neurotransmitters
| into the brain is very effective in healthy individuals.
|
| Signals from the gut to the brain arrive via the vagus
| nerve and probably also the other cranial nerves.
| culi wrote:
| Interesting! The way I've often heard it is that "over
| half of neurotransmitters _originate_ in the gut " --
| making it sound like it's talking about the
| neurotransmitters already at the brain. Do you have any
| citations that could clarify this?
| hollerith wrote:
| I probably learned that fact from an episode of
| neuroscientist Andrew Huberman's podcast--more likely
| than not episode one:
|
| https://youtu.be/H-XfCl-HpRM
| tux3 wrote:
| Neurotransmitters are used all over the body. A lot is
| centralized in the brain, but the periphery also uses
| neurons and neurotransmitters.
|
| Neurotransmitters in general don't particularly imply
| they're being used in the brain. Some neurotransmitters
| travel through the body, but a larger fraction are
| produced locally by a cell and intended only for close
| neighbors.
| serf wrote:
| that concept is part of the premise of Parasite Eve, a great
| novel, turned into a shitty movie, turned into an alright
| game.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Same as "The Marked heart" / "Palpito" / "Herzschlag" on
| Netflix.
|
| (For those about to watch it: the soul-vibing Neighbours-
| esque intro song is all part of the charm of this show. The
| shittier the intro, the more dramatic the needless
| melodrama is in contrast)
| wnoise wrote:
| The planarian result was probably insufficiently sterilizing
| the maze, and following previous scent-trails.
| dejj wrote:
| Feynman quoted a Mr. Young for admirable rigorousness in
| maze-running experiments.
|
| "Finding Mr Young"[1] identifies him as: "Mr Young was
| probably Quin Fischer Curtis, in his theses published in
| 1931/1936, as part of John F. Shepard's multi-decade research
| programme at the University of Michigan into 'floor cues',
| going well beyond just putting sand on the floor."
|
| 1: https://gwern.net/maze
| dalbasal wrote:
| It's all very abstract, and hard to narrow objectively,
| considering considering that we don't really know what a
| "memory" or skill is. The mechanism.
| agumonkey wrote:
| hehe, that's the first thought that came to mind.
|
| I don't know about people in biology in general, but it seems a
| whole new space of considerations.. topological communication,
| spread of information..
|
| and if people are curious about other aspects of this, google
| peter reddien, he had a lab who focused on planaria
| regeneration too, and by playing with location and numbers of
| cuts they triggered some cascading patterns of regeneration
| (think
| https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/File:iso_paper_si...
| but with biological tissue and organs)
| culi wrote:
| Plants too seem to be able to pass down epigenetic memories
|
| https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/fulltext/S1360-138...
|
| Given this and the recent discovery that plants can pass down
| RNA through mycorrhizal networks and can recognize their own
| offspring, it seems plausible that memories can also be passed
| through mycorrhizal networks.
|
| What stories does the soil hold?
| lagniappe wrote:
| I've long had this crackpot theory that mycorrhizal networks
| are to plants what skin and digestive microbiome are to
| humans
| culi wrote:
| Not that crackpot imo. The essential difference between
| animals and fungi is that at some point one group decided
| to digest things internally with a stomach (animals) and
| another group decided to digest things externally with
| enzymes (fungi). This external relationship to nutrients
| might make fungi as an organism simply more modular and
| able to make more interesting symbiotic relationships.
| Acting not just as partners but organs of a larger body
| djha-skin wrote:
| We do too. It's called epigenetics.
| mjfl wrote:
| but epigenetics usually stores information over much shorter
| timescales than generations. For example, cellular identity is
| stored epigenetically - whether a cell is a neuron or a white
| blood cell.
| dghughes wrote:
| Study finds epigenetic changes in children of Holocaust
| survivors https://www.research.va.gov/currents/1016-3.cfm
|
| I often wonder if my Irish ancestors genes passed on trauma
| through my family to me. With 900 years of invasion, war,
| famine, and strife you'd think something like that would be
| passed on.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The Irish have always been the underdogs of history, like
| the Jews. Is there anything that you could recommend me to
| read about the Irish situation?
| bohadi wrote:
| I think we will find more examples countering our modern idea
| of discrete organisms separated across generations.
|
| Consider again the glider translated across space time. Is it
| the same glider after 1,2,10 generations in time?
|
| I always found it curious the ancient archons had rulerships
| which kept continuity in nominative identity across individuals
| for several generations. The social practice continues with the
| first, the second, III, IV etc.
|
| The epigenetic view supports it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Then you get examples like Marcus Aurelius -> Commodus,
| betraying all genetic and epigenetic reason alike. The apple
| doesn't fall far from the tree, except when it does.
| pjscott wrote:
| Epigenetics is real, of course, but approximately nothing is
| passed between generations in humans. Here's a good rundown
| from a geneticist:
|
| https://www.razibkhan.com/p/you-cant-take-it-with-you-straig...
|
| The actual biological reality is fascinating, and so much more
| interesting than the distorted version you get from
| unscientific fabulists.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Huh? The article is able to summarize in one sentence what he
| thinks epigenetics is not, but is not able to summarize what
| it actually is. The post is clearly designed to make the
| reader feel like they are smarter than some other tribe, who
| don't believe that observations have molecular underpinnings.
| The Post-it notes analogy is also highly inaccurate and adds
| nothing.
|
| Epigenetics is one way that cells have of turning on and off
| the genes that are expressed. The same way that you can
| 'comment' a piece of code out using some special flags.
|
| What is special about it is that it turns out that your mom's
| experience during pregnancy (and your experience during
| development) can affect which genes are turned on and off in
| your cells.
|
| The classic example of this is that children of starving
| mothers such as during the holocaust, or during other
| famines, often went on to be overweight, because they were
| conditioned to be in 'starvation mode' so the genes for
| uptake of nutrients were more turned on, or the genes for
| decreasing wastefulness were turned off.
|
| It doesn't take much imagination to see how some of these
| things could reinforce each other, or alternate, over
| multiple generations.
| dopylitty wrote:
| There's another form of bacterial memory that is actually part of
| their immune system protecting against phages (viruses that
| attack bacteria).
|
| The bacteria cut up the phage genome when they're first attacked
| and (if they survive) store pieces in their own genome. Then when
| they detect the phage genes again they produce anti-phage
| defenses.
|
| The system is called "clustered regularly interspaced short
| palindromic repeats". It's also known as CRISPR (better known for
| other work :)
| bitwize wrote:
| I find it interesting how the literal antivirus mechanism used
| by those bacteria resemble antivirus _software_ : have a
| repository of virus-code signatures that are checked against.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| How else would you build such a system? It's probably easier
| than evolving a way to execute DNA/RNA in a sandbox or
| heuristically evaluating it. Life already had a reliable,
| extendable, self managing database system, so easier to
| repurpose that!
| flawn wrote:
| brought back school memories! yeah, that mechanism is pretty
| fire.
| tiku wrote:
| Always wondered if the human brain could do an offsite backup
| somewhere else, redundant in the brain or perhaps in the gut.
| tiku wrote:
| And what if this system was used in the animal world for
| instant danger recognition etc. we as humans don't need that
| anymore, because we always grow up in a fast changing
| environment, where that kind of knowledge is almost obsolete.
| amatecha wrote:
| Ah yeah like the system that makes people irrationally
| terrified of spiders and snakes and stuff? haha :)
| okr wrote:
| Why irrational? Never opened a toilet with a snake in it?
| Or spiders, that crawl over your hand, when you reach for
| the toothbrush? >:)
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| It seems more like an edge-side processes and cache in many
| different parts of the body and organs than an off-site backup.
| katzenversteher wrote:
| My hope is that the brain is basically just a "consciousness"
| receiver and does not create it. Brain damage results in bad
| reception, people with schizophrenia receive signals not
| intended for them, people with alien hand syndrome have their
| brain split into several receivers and so on.
|
| If that were the case, the body (including the brain) could die
| but the consciousness could continue to exist.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| That's what the religious and philosophical concept of a soul
| is.
|
| How would these signals be driven? What mechanism is used for
| signalling?
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Makes me wonder if there is a chemical mechanism by which humans
| pass information to each other as well, to combat an infection.
| If one human develops an ability to combat and infection to a
| novel virus, is there a mechanism by which antibody information
| is shared to other people. Infections eventually always fizzle
| out in the end.
|
| In times of war and stress, how a society can come together and
| work in unison to defeat the threat. It seems like there's more
| to it than patriotism. Why should one individuals be willing to
| die for the benefit of others...Very often young man, who have
| not yet reproduced. Seems like an evolutionary dead end
| behaviour. Is there some Psycho/chemical mechanism by which its
| triggered.
|
| The way so many people were scared of covid, that fear spread and
| like a virus infected the society.
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is part of the plot in Children of Ruin by
| Tchaikovsky. It's a good book.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Children of Time would be a closer match in terms of the
| ingestible knowledge transfer. Also, siderant: the rest of the
| series is not as great. I'd recommend new readers to try the
| first book (Time), and then maybe skim through the second
| (Ruin), and ignore the third (Memory).
| jghn wrote:
| Having just wrapped up Memory I found Time to be great. I
| thought Ruin was a slog, although I did love it at first. It
| was just a bad copy of the first. And while I thought the
| ending was telegraphed too much, I did enjoy how Memory was
| very different.
|
| Came across a thread on Reddit recently about these three and
| many people made the point that Ruin & Memory are so
| different from each other in terms of sequels that which is
| the "good one" is a polarizing discussion.
| thegiogi wrote:
| As a balance to your opinion, I thoroughly enjoyed all three.
| Sure the first hit's different, but they all deserve the
| attention.
| dejj wrote:
| "These iron memories persist for at least four generations and
| disappear by the seventh generation."
|
| Make note that for example "when well fed, E. coli bacteria
| divide once every 20 minutes"[1], making that iron memory last
| for 80 to 140 minutes. Though that may still be longer than it
| takes them to discard a plasmid (genetic "loose change" on e.g.
| immunity resistance) when competing for reproductive speed.
|
| 1: Nick Lane, "Power, Sex, Suicide. Mitochondria and the meaning
| of life", 2nd ed., 2018, p. 175
| rusticpenn wrote:
| That type of plasticity is important for the survival of the
| species ( if the memories are important enough, then the later
| generations would have used it and it will probably remain)
| samuell wrote:
| I wish there was more bio stuff on HN in general. Or that there
| was an HN for bio. (There is https://biostars.org , which is not
| at all really the same thing, more like a help forum).
| fikama wrote:
| Yep me too. There is also a discord server "biocord" which
| seems nice, but for some reason I am just unable to use
| discord. I don't enjoy hanging there as much as on regular news
| aggregators as HN and Reddit.
|
| I was also musing about making one myself using lobste.rs
| GitHub. But I never looked into it much.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| i don't get it. just read the text and all i find is a murky
| association of iron levels and some fuzzy interpretation of the
| term "memory".
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| No one's mentioned Michael Levin's work yet? Surprising.
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.7682...
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0268...
|
| https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12976-01...
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29148257/
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