[HN Gopher] Zebrafish protein unlocks dormant genes for heart re...
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Zebrafish protein unlocks dormant genes for heart repair
Author : manmal
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-01-03 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hubrecht.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hubrecht.eu)
| LegitShady wrote:
| *in mice
| yborg wrote:
| If we were mice this would be an amazing time to be alive.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Individual mice don't really live long enough to observe
| technological change though. Humans probably look like giant
| slow lumbering ancient wizards.
| eluketronic wrote:
| "...in mice" would be a helpful addition to the title.
| mt_ wrote:
| That won't stop Bryan Johnson.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| His new zebrafish diet.
| bluGill wrote:
| How easy are zebrafish to raise? What is their lifecycle?
| Can I raise millions of them in my basement or will I need
| to buy some warehouse? How long do they take? What do they
| eat? Any venture capitalists willing to fund my next
| business?
| tejtm wrote:
| https://zfin.org/zf_info/zfbook/zfbk.html
|
| it is an open book ... no capital, but you are welcome to
| cut me in
| scheme271 wrote:
| It's a common model organism in biology. One of the
| reasons is that it's easy to breed and keep in labs with
| fairly quick lifecycles. Raising millions of them is
| probably going to require a warehouse just like it would
| take to raise a million mice.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| "...in mice, in a lab" as the saying goes
| tejtm wrote:
| To be fair, the gene also repairs heart damage in Zebrafish
| which is more than just "in mice". I understand the reasons
| behind the meme "in mice", but on the other hand dismissing
| valid progress because humans reflexively insisting on
| exceptional snowflake status is counterproductive.
| treyd wrote:
| Plus, the jumo from zebrafish to mice is a lot larger than
| the jump from mice to humans. If it still functions across
| that large of a jump then it's very likely it'll also work in
| humans.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| Apropos: "Analysis of animal-to-human translation shows that
| only 5% of animal-tested therapeutic interventions obtain
| regulatory approval for human applications" -
| https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
| computerdork wrote:
| Although, even if it doesn't directly work in humans, it might
| be a stepping stone to something similar that might.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Yes in mice but this is startling to me that you can just drop a
| random protein from one species and have it work in another.
| Whatever weird programming language life is made from it seems to
| be a surprisingly forgiving environment. I wonder if the leap
| between a fish and a mouse is less than the distance between a
| mouse and a human?
|
| And no I doubt this will suddenly work in humans I'm more just
| fascinated by genetics proteins and life in general and just
| constantly amazed any of this works at all.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > Whatever weird programming language life is made from it
| seems to be a surprisingly forgiving environment.
|
| Either that, or we truly are more similar than we seem to
| ourselves. It makes sense that humans would have a greater
| sense of discernment at the sensual level genetically nearer to
| us than further from us.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I assume we only hear about the cases when the protein does
| something interesting, and not the 999/1000 cases when it
| doesn't.
| jaggederest wrote:
| It's all just chemistry, and the chemistry is extremely
| conservative all the way back to the first eukaryotes. Once our
| kind of life figures out a way to do something it's very
| uncommon that the fundamental pathways change - not by any
| means impossible.
|
| Cells that have novel things happen to them nearly always die.
| Others become cancer, which is a career-limiting move for
| multicellular life at least. So the process of changes to basic
| chemistry of life is very slow. That's why omnivores can eat
| almost anything and be fine with it - imagine if different
| branches of plants and animals had really novel things in them,
| like a critter with nerve gas for a circulatory fluid.
|
| There's been some discussion of mirror bacteria lately, which
| have opposite chirality in all their molecules, which would be
| substantially problematic since we really don't have defenses
| against that kind of thing. That just shows the degree to which
| you'd have to rejigger biochemistry to get a truly whole new
| thing going on.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Like all plants that produce sugar produce left-handed sugar
| molecules. And all animals that can digest sugar can only
| digest left-handed sugar molecules. There was no meeting,
| this is just the way it worked out.
| clort wrote:
| > I wonder if the leap between a fish and a mouse is less than
| the distance between a mouse and a human?
|
| No, mice are mammals just like humans. Fish were around long
| before mammals even existed.
| vhcr wrote:
| Under a monophyletic definition, mammals are fish.
| kleton wrote:
| It is a protein that exists in mammals. Presumably they
| produced the murine version to put in the mouse. Science
| journalism screwed up the paper's language, calling it a
| zebrafish protein, when it is a protein that is conserved for
| all vertebrates. But the _function_ of the protein, and its
| role in heart regeneration, was identified in zebrafish.
|
| > Directly after LAD ligation during MI surgery, hearts were
| injected twice with 15 ml of AAV9(CMV:GFP) or AAV9(CMV:HA-
| Hmga1) (1 x 1012 virus particles per mouse) in opposing regions
| bordering the area at risk of ischemic injury.
|
| The paper doesn't say whether the viral vector (AAV9) used the
| murine or zebrafish Hmga1 sequence, but it is more likely that
| they used the murine.
| yapyap wrote:
| thanks fish
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| That is very exciting. Beyond the obvious applications in humans,
| it would be interesting to test whether love to see whether this
| could help reverse immune damage from cross-species heart
| transplantation.
|
| Small comment, the Hubrecht Institute showing an "artistic
| representation" that looks exactly like actual histology data is
| very weird. They should make a cartoon graphic if they are trying
| to establish a model. How did they even make that? AI?
| InMice wrote:
| Cool, this is an interesting article
| byyoung3 wrote:
| username checks out haha
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| I hope one day mice can access the incredible amount of
| treatments we have developed for them.
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