From the title I thought that the UV opsin itself was also performing the pressure sensing function… Which would be fascinating to me, as I have worked with viscosity and pressure-sensitive fluorophores in the past (BODIPYs and DCDHF), and I would love to see living things making use of this molecular sensor design.

But I now see that it is a different molecular sensor that is also present in the UV sensing cell:

Our results indicate that the ciliary opsin required for detecting UV light is not essential for pressure sensation.

So, today is not the day we find pressure-sensitive fluorescent sensors in a living organism, but that is still a fascinating finding. I will have to read more about those “TRP channels”, the “ultimate integrators of sensory stimuli”. They seem like a very interesting class of bio molecules that I still know too little about 😁

Really nice work, thanks a lot for sharing it here!!

That is amazing! Thanks for sharing!!

The human Y chromosome has been notoriously difficult to sequence and assemble because of its complex repeat structure that includes long palindromes, tandem repeats and segmental duplications. As a result, more than half of the Y chromosome is missing from the GRCh38 reference sequence and it remains the last human chromosome to be finished

Oh wow. This is surprising! I thought the full human genome had been sequence a while ago.

My view is: I don’t like this cultural element, and I am glad that I live in a country without it. But if I am a visitor from abroad I would not resist the local culture and try to impose my own values. If I am aware of this cultural element and I dislike it, my options would be to either avoid restaurants and other tipping situations as much as I can, or simply account for the tip when making my financial decisions, and pay it.

If I live in the country then it is different, because then I am more entitled to be a driver of change. Personally, my approach would be to support businesses with explicit no-tipping policy, and to refuse receiving tips myself.

Nevertheless, proving that a parasite is manipulating an ant body as opposed to an ant body acting in response to an invader would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible; the authors say this potential pathway of manipulation should be interpreted with caution.

Would it? I don’t know the molecular basis of ant epigenetics, but in bees the young are fed with ‘royal jelly’, which contains fatty acids that behave as histone deacetylase inhibitors. The acetylated histones appear to lead to the expression of the “royal genes”, and the inhibitors in the royal jelly keep the genes active by stopping the deacetylation. It is even possible to give the royal jelly to other insects and obtain some interesting phenotypes!

I would imagine that the epigenetic regulation in ants is similar in some ways to that in bees. If one can show that the parasite produces molecules such as the histone deacetylase inhibitors, and then show that those compounds in isolation can achieve the youthful state, that would be some good evidence that the parasite is controlling the expression.

Not saying that it is easy, but it doesn’t look like an impossible challenge!

Laughing Emu Meditation and Mindfulness Yoga, obviously!

There are good reasons for that. I think that to understand the details the students really have to have built a strong foundation… If a teacher would have managed to explain it to me in high school, It probably would have gone over my head. Now it looks easy, but it took me a while!

Those are some great points, thank you! I wasn’t aware (and if I ever was, I forgot!) that glycosylation was much more common in eukaryotes than in prokaryotes - that is very interesting.

EDIT: didn’t consider extraction of the molecule, in both cases of plant and microbial production, that would require eome specific equipment. Probably centrifuges and chromatography required for both.

Still, I think that the technical requirements for an extraction are much more accessible than an industrial a bioreactor setup. So your points still stand.

ATP is so interesting that it could have a whole community dedicated to it!

During middle school and high school in biology classes ATP would be referred to as the “energy currency of the cell”, but at that time the concept of ‘energy’ was still so abstract to me. And I think it was the same for my teachers too, because whenever I tried to ask them what it actually meant that ATP had ‘energy’ in it they were also unable to provide me a concrete response. Best case scenario they would explain that energy is the ability to do work, but I was never given a more specific molecular-level description of what it meant.

It wasn’t until the second or third year of biochem in college that it finally clicked. And it is thanks to this kind of work, in which the precise mechanical details of how the hydrolysis of ATP or the phosphorylation of ADP is coupled to the structural dynamics of a protein. With this type of work I could finally follow the microscopic steps that are responsible for these “energy” conversions, and to finally associate each individual step to the “energy change” that can be calculated using electrodynamics and quantum theory. I would put an understanding of “how ATP is the energy currency of the cell” on the list of my favorite fundamental concepts.

I don’t blame my teachers for not being able to explain this concept, though, because when they studied these topics they did not have access to the trove of structural information, images, and literature that we have today!

This is what I think, but if anyone understands it differently please correct me.

Vertical scalability refers to scaling within a single instance. More users join and they post more content, increasing the amount of disk space needed to hold that memory, network bandwidth to handle many users downloading comments and images at once, and processing power.

Horizontal scaling refers to the lemmyverse growing because of the addition of new instances. The problem in this form of scaling is due to the resources that an instance has to use due to its interactions with other instances. So, you may create a small instance without a lot of users, but the instance might still need a lot of resources if it attempts to retrieve a lot of information (posts, comments, user information, etc) from the other larger instances. For example, at some point a community in lemmy.ml might be so popular that subscribing to that community from a small instance would be too much of a burden on the smaller instance because of the amount of memory required to save the constant stream of new posts. The horizontal scaling is a problem when the lemmyverse becomes so large that a machine with only a small amount of resources is no longer able to be part of the lemmyverse because its memory gets filled up in a few hours or days.

I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.

(This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don’t think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.

This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive

Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don’t understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.

Easiest way I can think of would be to go to the list of your subscribed communities and copy/paste them: https://lemmy.ml/communities/listing_type/Subscribed/page/1

A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.

Woah! That’s amazing. We think that we know a lot, and yet we are still discovering organelles within a model organism that gets scrutinized under the microscope every day all over the world!

The reason why I specify this type of material is because wet paper can break off and harden, and cotton can leave some thin fibers behind that wrap around the insect. But, if done carefully enough, any absorbent material can work.

My priority would be to help the insect dry while avoiding applying much force on the insect. I would use some highly absorbent material that does not produce much fluff - like a microfiber cloth, and try to dry the area around the wings and as close to the wings as possible. I would then put the cloth right by its legs and see if the insect can hold onto it and lift itself up.

Another option would be to try to make its surroundings as safe as posible, blocking direct sunlight but letting air flow, and then wait for the insect to dry. But if the drying is too slow the insect might hurt itself or run out of energy if it gets agitated.

It is a delicate situation. I have had some similar situations with insects falling into the pool and then trying to get them dry. Sometimes the insects do lose a wing in the process, or even lose it in the water before I find them.

With regards to using plants to grow medicines in space - I think that it it makes more sense to use microorganisms for this. So I am trying to reason whether there is a reason why one would prefer to use a plant.

Perhaps since plants already have more complex bio-synthetic machinery to create secondary metabolites than bacteria, fewer genes would have to be added to produce the target molecule. Fungi also have a lot of powerful systems already built-in. I think that it will be a case-by-case basis, a specific target molecule will be easier to produce using a specific organism.

So a space medicine farm could end up being interestingly diverse… For example, goats have been genetically engineered to produce milk that contains spider silk.

Eventually I do think that metabolic engineering could move far enough that it will be possible to engineer whatever machinery you want into easier to grow microorganisms. Then we will just grow everything in flasks in shakers and bioreactors.