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Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

>You might expect that as bodies became more complex, genomes did as well.

I bring this up in threads about diet/nutrition (and always get down voted).

But the idea is humans have about 20,000 protein coding genes and something as simple as wheat has estimated 150,000 to 334,000.

Where I get downvotes is the concept/hypothesis (not mine) that the explaination rests with the microbiome (which we have and something like wheat doesn’t).

I’d be interested in learning if complex creatures like jellyfish with simple genomes have a complex microbiome.

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They've done experiments on animals with sterile guts and it's not like it alters their morphology.

Just because something uses a broader variety of building blocks, doesn't mean the resultant structure is necessarily more complex than a structure built with less building block variety.

> Where I get downvotes is the concept/hypothesis (not mine) that the explaination rests with the microbiome (which we have and something like wheat doesn’t).

You seem to have taken something interesting and then leapt to a conclusion.

It could be that. Or it could be that not all of the protein coding genes in wheat are active, it could be that ours overlap and interact in more information-dense ways. It could be that the internal processes of wheat are very (perhaps needlessly) complex to come to simpler outcomes. It could be a lot of different reasons, without evidence for something in particular, all we really have there is speculation.

I'm not sure where you get he 150-300,000 number, but when I go to the NCBI at look at their entries for the wheat genome, it seems to have about 27,000 proteins, just like most other plants. Regardless of DNA content, most higher organisms seem to have between 10-30,000 protein coding genes.

A more important difference might be that humans eat other life forms and can absorb nutrients that way. There are known to be many vitamins which humans get from the food we consume which we cannot get any other way.

If I were to examine two programs that operate identically, but one has 1/10 lines of code, I would assume it is more efficient, more fault tolerant, more general purpose/reusable, and would assume a more competent developer wrote it. edit Not making a case for intelligent design – absolutely not.

I don't know about wheat, but I know maize has a significant amount of gene duplication.

https://genome.cshlp.org/content/11/1/55.full

Does the figure you quote for wheat take that into account?

Wheat has a microbiome too. Academia hasn’t mined it as extensively as the human one, but Industry has and VCs have been very generous.

hint: complaining about downvotes usually just gets more downvotes

just add what insight you have and then the crowd decides if they care, like or dislike

I’m not complaining, just acknowledging for the sake of preempting the attacks of comments about microbiome.

Almost any comment in a discussion about diet/nutrition is bound to get downvoted (at least on HN). People are probably bound to downvote anything about the microbiome for the same reasons. Yet we know the microbiome is responsible for turning (at least some) genes on/off, and otherwise our study of the microbiome is in its infancy.

I’d rather have someone reply about the jelly fish microbiome, if any, than explaination of HN social norms. The cool thing about HN is you might get some expert, in this case a marine biologist lurking, not the social norms.

If you haven't already, you might be interested to read some of Lynn Margulis' work. She was a big proponent of the idea that symbiosis is an overlooked source of speciation. In a book of hers I read recently she emphasized how complex organisms like humans depend on a huge foundation of other simpler organisms. You might find some interesting fuel for your ideas in her books.

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