[HN Gopher] Neonatal fungi: lifelong metabolic health via macrop...
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       Neonatal fungi: lifelong metabolic health via macrophage b cell
       development
        
       Author : gnabgib
       Score  : 70 points
       Date   : 2025-03-09 03:23 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.science.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
        
       | djtango wrote:
       | It's interesting that "external" entities like microbiota play a
       | role in the host's lifelong development. But it's more
       | interesting that this is interesting - life is emergent, whatever
       | result we observe exists by accident and because it worked.
       | 
       | Our understanding of these phenomena rely on us building models
       | and abstractions to assist in us managing the complexity of the
       | minutiae. But as we've seen in this particular study, the
       | minutiae matter and sometimes our own incomplete models can come
       | to box our own thinking.
       | 
       | As the saying goes - all models are wrong, some are useful...
        
         | sigmoid10 wrote:
         | The endosymbiotic theory suggests that there is considerable
         | overlap in functions with what you would call "external"
         | entities. At some point we might just consider these things
         | part of the host system, even if they don't share the
         | particular DNA of your nuclei. At the scale of trillions of
         | organisms working together it becomes really hard to tell what
         | is "you" and what isn't.
        
           | devmor wrote:
           | It's a very cool in comparison to the standard train of
           | thought. Human beings are just as much ecosystems as we are
           | organisms.
        
           | kurthr wrote:
           | Without our gut bacteria/biome, we're cooked. Not surprising
           | there are other cases as well. How important are eyelash
           | mites?
        
           | djtango wrote:
           | Well yeah exactly! This starts becoming even more important
           | as we start doing more and more unnatural stuff. Like if we
           | started doing births in test tubes we may find out a whole
           | bunch of edge cases arise because of "external" factors.
           | 
           | On a less crazy sci fi issue, I've seen murmurs that sugar
           | alternatives like aspartame can still have effects on your
           | microbiota
        
             | perrygeo wrote:
             | I don't know, the more I learn about mitochondria, the more
             | crazy sci-fi it sounds! Sometimes it feels like they're
             | calling the shots and our bodies are just their spaceship.
        
           | perrygeo wrote:
           | Yes! Feels like our concept of an individual gets blurrier
           | the more detail we get:
           | 
           | Plants are not truly separate, they are connected via fungal
           | networks - the "wood wide web".
           | 
           | Lichen are not one species, they are made of a cooperative of
           | fungus, yeast, bacteria, and sometimes archea. All 3 domains
           | of life combined into one "organism"! The fungus is generally
           | seen to be the primary entity, using the bacteria to get
           | energy from photosynthesis and in turn protecting them with a
           | durable casing.
           | 
           | It really looks like humans (and every other animal) are
           | symbiotic organisms similar to lichen. The gut microbiome and
           | the mitochondria that live inside us don't share our DNA and
           | have behaviors independent of us. They provide us energy
           | using aerobic metabolism and we protect them by hosting them
           | in our stomach or cell walls.
           | 
           | Even the "we" in that last sentence is carry a lot of
           | assumptions. It's an evolutionary process, not the conscious
           | effort of an individual.
        
       | hirenj wrote:
       | This is pretty interesting, also that they get it down to the
       | amount of mannan in the fungal cell walls being somehow related
       | to the b cell amounts. There's probably a nice project in here to
       | figure out what the receptors are on the macrophages that are
       | modulating this process. Obviously candidates would be some of
       | the lectins they carry (mannose receptor?).
        
       | rubzah wrote:
       | These are fungi in the gut, as far as I understand. Seems weird
       | that they would affect the pancreas. Wonder if that is the case
       | in adults too? (not affect development, but some other effects)
        
         | DANmode wrote:
         | Fungal impact on nervous and endocrine system is not weird at
         | all.
        
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