Comment by tcj_phx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tcj_phx | Hacker News Reader

Everything old is new again. Early 20th-century biologists were exploring the role of fields in the development of embryos. This line of inquiry was snuffed out when DNA came along. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenetic_field#Historical...

From the article:

> The rationale [...] was that “since DNA is what is inherited, information stored in the genes must specify all that is needed to develop.”

> The extreme form of this view is “to explain everything by saying ‘it is in the genes,’ or DNA, and this trend has been reinforced by the increasingly powerful and affordable DNA sequencing technologies,” Huang said. “But we need to zoom out: Before molecular biology imposed our myopic tunnel vision, biologists were much more open to organism-level principles.”

> The tide now seems to be turning, according to Herrera-Rincon and others. “It’s too simplistic to consider the genome as the only source of biological information,” she said.

(emphasis added)

If genes are all-powerful, there is no hope for those who begin to deteriorate. But if our bio-electric fields are more important than our genes, there is much greater possibility for improving our health than the geneticists have led us to believe.

I think any sane biologist will agree that there are layers upon layers of complexity on top of genotype. But the first layer is still DNA. There is a difference between gene-centric and gene-only. The former gives biologist an anchor point to begin their research, the latter is ridiculous.

> But the first layer is still DNA.

This would be one hypothesis. The article is about how the competing field of inquiry ("bioelectricity") has been mistakenly ignored for the past 60+ years.

What if the field is more important than the genes?

Your idea of "morphogenetic fields" is fundamentally incorrect; re-read the wikipedia article you linked to, the word "electricity" doesn't appear in it at all. It's talking about "fields" of chemical gradients which control the development of tissues; that kind of idea has been established developmental biology for over a century.

Meanwhile, in terms of the parent article, yes- it turns out that "bioelectricity" is an important part of the embryonic development. But this is not at all serving the same role as DNA; DNA stores durable information, whereas these fields are being used for, essentially, intercellular communication. I would think that the fact that the researchers successfully replace a frog's entire brain, for developmental purposes, with a simple tweak to an ion channel, pretty clearly demonstrates that the amount of vital information being carried this way is minimal.

Nice. I assumed NGF interactions with other developmental signalers like SHH, BMP, etc was the mechanism of action in this anyways.

It's been a while since I was in a devo lab, but I've watched a few presentations regarding wound healing and denervation such as seen in paraplegics with sacral ulcers. The hypothesis was that the nerves were gone and therefore NGF and other trophic factors were gone leading to impaired healing. I'm assuming healing and development are nearly synonymous in some tissues. Like you said, it's not the electrical signals that necessarily matter that much, it's the chemicals produced by the nerves.

The point I was trying to make is that there is no "more" or "less" important. There are just multiple layers of complexity that are all required to form the end result. DNA being the first layer just means the information that sets up the environment for bioelectric/epigenetic/whatever mechanisms still originates from DNA. Is it possible that there is some kind of mysterious force/particle that creates DNA? Anything is possible I guess. But that just seems like anomaly hunting at this point.

The discussion of what layer we should concentrate our research on has been going on for a long time actually. I remember reading some passionate arguments a decade or so ago about how we should concentrate on cells as the basic unit of biology.

I agree. Epigenetic studies hold the key to making reasonable interventions into genetic conditions.

While genetic screening is desirable, it is going to take a long while before we can have it on a species level. But if we can develop chemo-electric interventions that can alter the progression of genetic conditions, that would be a fresh change in the field, impacting many lives.

As we hit the physical limitations of interventions based on central dogma(which is still years away), we will have to look elsewhere, with an emphasis on the temporal progression of gene expression with respect to different variables. This is going to be difficult, but I can hopeful that some controlled processes might turn out in the future - given our data processing abilities.

This sounds equivalent to saying, "Ha, it wasn't DNA that governs proteins in cells, it was RNA all along". Chemical gradients, ion gradients, morphogens, etc, may all play super important indepensible roles in embryo development, but those things in turn are still driven by genes.

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