When I was just starting out on my biotech undergrad I used to come up with whacky ideas every day after learning something new in biochemistry:
1. Rickettsia Bacteria have an ATP transporter! If we engineer E. Coli with this transporter, we can feed bioreactors with pure ATP and get even more efficiency! (Turns out this is not a real bottleneck in bioreactors, and you’ll likely waste more money synthesizing ATP anyway)
2. Glucose is transported in intestines via a glucose-sodium antiporter protein. Maybe we can find a drug that blocks this and you can eat as much sugar as you want! (Turns out you’ll have uncontrolled diarrhea if you do).
This idea sounds as boneheaded as these ideas. If there’s a “leak”, you bet your ass it’s there for a reason.
> 2. Glucose is transported in intestines via a glucose-sodium antiporter protein. Maybe we can find a drug that blocks this and you can eat as much sugar as you want! (Turns out you’ll have uncontrolled diarrhea if you do).
It's very cool! It's the SGLT protein. It's actually a sodium-glucose co-transporter and is why gatorade is so effective! It's the perfect mix of salt, sugar, and water to take advantage of that very protein (where salt goes, water follows).
And yes there is a drug that targets these - it's the SGLT inhibitors and they're very in vogue right now. Ozempic and Mounjaro are the two big ones in the news right now. They act on the SGLT I (found only in the kidney) so that you urinate more sugar. They don't act on the SGLT 2 (only found in the gut) but other medications in that class act on both.
But congratulations and alas! You nearly invented gatorade and a multi-billion dollar diabetes and weight-loss drug. Hardly bone-headed ideas.
You got the meds wrong - semaglutide and trizapeptide are glp-1 based meds, sglt inhibitors are a separate class and don’t include those two - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGLT2_inhibitor
Importantly, the issue why my ideas were boneheaded was that typically there’s a lot of unknown side functions and ramifications in biology which are easily overlooked. Glp-1 based drugs weren’t discovered by deliberate hypothesis testing. Sglt2 inhibitors might be but given the number of trials it took in attacking metabolic syndrome using “logic” (avoid fat, avoid sugar, inhibit fat uptake, eat sugar substitutes, etc). This just eeems like a fluke more than merit of following simple logic into complex hormonal systems.
This is true in all medicines. Except antibiotics almost no effective medicine was “invented” by applying first principles the way you would in physics, even if initially it looked like that’s how it worked. Take chemotherapy for example. If the drug works effectively by killing all dividing cells completely, it clearly should kill you, but it doesn’t. It just kills cancers. But that’s because turns out our immune system plays a pivotal role in chemotherapy effectiveness.
> Glucose is transported in intestines via a glucose-sodium antiporter protein. Maybe we can find a drug that blocks this and you can eat as much sugar as you want! (Turns out you’ll have uncontrolled diarrhea if you do).
Uncontrolled diarrhea for how long?
I'd pay for a pill that would do similar to what you describe but for pizza instead of sugar if the uncontrolled diarrhea was only for a few hours.
So there’s one already - acarbose - it kinda blocks metabolizing starch and hence blocks its uptake. You don’t get diarrhea (that’s just because my idea tried to block the transporter which also transports sodium). But acarbose blocks starch metabolism so the bacteria in your tummy metabolize it and make you incredibly and unbearably flatulent. So not something you want to do if you have anyone else in your home lol.
It satisfied all the culinary requirements for being oil without being a lipid we could use, because it was too big to be absorbed. So it came through the tract as-is. Some people weren’t, er, oil-tight and experienced some seepage.
In the upthread scenario you’d be using something to block receptors so more real sugar can be absorbed but not metabolized. To your point, then it passes through, like the fake oil. But it’s because it has the assist from the blocker rather than itself being incompatible.
I’m a little surprised there’s an existing drug that does this though. I thought excess sugar heading through the kidneys was bad.
Don't sell yourself of biochem short though, you were an undergrad thinking outside the box. Sometimes we happen upon drugs by accident, but often someone went through the same type of train of thought as you and found an ingress into our biochemistry that could actually be exploited for a desirable outcome.
Ha ha I don’t, I thought I was on the right path, when I applied to Harvard for my PhD I sent them a copy of 30 such wacky ideas thinking this would convince them, but didn’t. I got rejected from every top 50 university first time (on top of good gpa, top GRE scores etc). Apparently publishing in your undergrad (which is pretty much something of pure luck in india) is the only currency they take into account. I still found my way to a good school and did my PhD though!
I also believe ideas are cheap and they probably do too, somehow that isn't paradoxical in my mind with my previous statement but I'm not sure if I could cogently explain why :)
I’m well past those days so don’t take it as a treatise on my own abilities but my experiences since have not suggested that these schools used any good metric in choosing students. They merely selected for the successful and hardworking folks. The latter trait is great but the former is not. If anything a phd is training for facing failure.
I also submitted subject GRE scores which in retrospect clearly differentiated people who will attain academic success and people who won’t. The universities literally said they won’t consider the scores even if submit them. Also, ideas are not cheap. Sure you have to execute on them as well, but ideas are not cheap at all. At least not the good ones.
A quick Google told me that photosynthesis uses 45% of the daylight spectrum. So I don't really understand this article, especially since it talks about photosynthesis being 100% efficient, when it is actually quite low:
"Photosynthetically active radiation (400–700 nm) constitutes only 45% of the actual daylight. Therefore the maximum theoretical efficiency of the photosynthesis process is approximately 11%. In fact, in any case, plants don’t use all incoming sunlight (due to respiration, reflection, light inhibition and light saturation) and do not convert all harvested energy into biomass, which brings about a general photosynthetic proficiency of 3%–6% based on total solar radiation. "
The difference may be the efficiency of the photosynthetic process and the efficiency of the plant itself. Like how a motor may be X% efficient, but the car it's driving on the road is far less efficient.
Given how well conserved this is among plants, this has probably evolved multiple times and the reason why plants arrive at it must be very strong. Like say how a lot of animals living and swimming in water look like fish even though many of the ancestors of today's "fishes" lived on land: the "fish shape" evolved multiple times.
The quantum chemical process of photosynthesis in chlorophyll is (nearly) 100% efficient. The process works via quantum teleportation which means you don't get phonon / heat loss like you do with semiconductor absorption bands, IIRC.
This struck me as a bit absolute, and I immediately thought of mushrooms, but I believe they may in turn rely largely on organic matter such as plants. There are some worms and other animals that can survive on bacteria, so I suppose you could theoretically eat those and invalidate this quote. However, it seems to be more true than I immediately suspected.
The Sun is the ultimate energy source for our planet. We need it for warmth and photosynthesis (and lots of other stuff.) Life would definitely not exist as we know it without either of those. Eg: without photosynthesis, bacteria would quickly (on a geologic scale) consume/turn to waste anything valuable (including oxygen). Without warmth, or planet would be too cold to sustain life.
We get our oxygen mostly from photosynthesis as well as a few other smaller sources (methane based, I think.)
Turns out, seasons help much of life on Earth too which is just defined by the tilt angle as it processes around the Sun.
Additionally, stars are factories for creating heavier elements. We wouldn’t have many of the requisite elements for life on Earth without them having been produced by the Sun first.
Plants (or more generally, photosynthetic life) are the most direct consumer of solar energy and thus the most abundant source of energy for other living organisms on the planet.
There are a small number of organisms that get their energy ultimately from mineral sources and a few cases of an organism getting some energy from something similar to photosynthesis from local radioactive sources but the vast majority of energy used by living things by a wide margin comes from solar radiation.
Unless your food chain contains a significant number of extremophiles (like something eating near hydrothermal vents), essentially everything can be traced back to photosynthesis.
Makes me wonder if anyone made a chart of various organisms depicted as ranges on a "degree of energy separation from sunlight", where plants are 0 (they eat sunlight), herbivores are 1 (they eat plants, which eat sunlight), etc.
Hmm, if you had a species of vultures that only fed on apex predators would that give them a higher trophic level? Or what about bacteria that only eat human flesh? It's wild to think of a bacteria at the top of the chain. Does it count if you only partially eat the victim and don't kill them?
Yeah, life is messy. It’s part of why it is so hard to define what a living thing is. I think of the world as a giant soup of stuff that eats each other. It’s strange to me that humans think they are above any of it. Really, we are right in the middle of it all! :)
If I want to get super-reductive, I think of life as one continuous self-sustaining chemical reaction. It's an accurate, though usually not very useful way of thinking - but I still cherish it, as it reminds me that life and evolution do not obey the conceptual boundaries we set for it. The concept of a "cell" or "individual" doesn't exist in the runtime of physical reality - if we see evolution as optimization process, it's one that can and does optimize across those boundaries.
I put up war time Germany's coal butter up.
Synthetic and could just add well be from scrubbed CO2 and electrolyzed hydrogen, instead of coal and water, as the feedstock/syngas source.
the shocking part (haha it's electrons, get it?) is that natural selection hasn't figured out a way to harvest this free energy, it's usually so good at that! Perhaps the speculation that it's potentially harmful energy bleedoff fits that scenario, but still, life usually finds a way to exploit resources.
the "good enough" to survive and pass on it's genes. So you do have to be 'the best', just not 'the best possible'. You also don't have to be 'the best' at all possible measures, just 'the best' at surviving among what you compete with.
You just have to be good enough to reproduce. If you follow the logic, 'the best' collapses into a tautology, where it is defined by reproducing (i.e., fitness). If there was really a singular "the best" and you had to be it to reproduce, at the individual level, populations would have a much harder time retaining heterozygosity and genetic diversity. At the species level, the only circumstance in which a species has to be 'the best' is if it has close to an identical fundamental niche (i.e., habitat and food requirements) as another species, because even given competitors for similar resources, there is often scope to occupy only a portion of the niche (i.e., abandon low elevation or certain foods), aka the realised niche, to avoid competition.
This is my point precisely (that it is a tautology). It's called 'survival of the fittest', not 'survival of the fit enough' for this reason.
If the measure of value is 'fitness', then 'survival of the fittest' is exactly the same as saying 'survival of the best'.
'The best' does not imply singular except in cases which provide a metric which is a total ordering among contestants, which is usually far more specific than the usual usage of the word. For example, you would probably agree in general that the Olympics "is where the best go to compete", but there isn't implied a singular 'best' Olympian unless we consider only a single event and further insist that the measure is medal earned in a specific year. As you can see, to get to a singular 'the best' requires an event and a year and the rule that delivers a total ordering of goodness, but the normal English usage does not imply any of these. In fact in the normal usage, 'the best' would apply to everyone who attends the Olympics as a competitor, even alternates who do not compete in the end.
Its semantics, but generally the best would be taken to refer to a superlative, gold medal at the Olympics. I'd say you just need to be good enough to attend the Olympics to attend the Olympics as a competitor. Its actually an apt analogy because there are some pretty trash athletes from some countries in some disciplines, some famously so, simply because they didn't have much local competition in their country. Survival of the fittest itself is a tautology, Darwin didn't coin it for the first edition. It doesn't really matter what the convenient slogan is, all of these concepts can be understood mathematically and it isn't the single individual or species with the highest fitness value that persists on whatever time scale is of interest.
I am sure I am to some degree as is everyone, but whether I am insofar as it would be pertinent to the conversation I am not so sure, as I have had a decent bit of training in evolutionary biology and have written a PhD thesis and manuscripts that discuss organismal fitness at length. I can't tell if you are or aren't confused and perhaps just wanted to play with the semantics of superlatives. I reckon you seem to be dealing with the concept in a colloquial sense though.
Nah, the rate limiting step of plant growth is carbon fixation. The problem is if you harvest too many electrons what are you going to do with this energy. Travel too far off of "neutral" redox potential and it winds up being a problem.
1. Rickettsia Bacteria have an ATP transporter! If we engineer E. Coli with this transporter, we can feed bioreactors with pure ATP and get even more efficiency! (Turns out this is not a real bottleneck in bioreactors, and you’ll likely waste more money synthesizing ATP anyway)
2. Glucose is transported in intestines via a glucose-sodium antiporter protein. Maybe we can find a drug that blocks this and you can eat as much sugar as you want! (Turns out you’ll have uncontrolled diarrhea if you do).
This idea sounds as boneheaded as these ideas. If there’s a “leak”, you bet your ass it’s there for a reason.