Scientists Put Tardigrade Proteins into Human Cells. Here's What Happened | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Put Tardigrade Proteins into Human Cells. Here's What Happened

sciencealert.com

6 pointsgardenfelder13 comments

The team focused on a particular protein called CAHS D, already known to protect against extreme drying (desiccation).

Answer: It slowed down the metabolism of the cell. It was lethal.

>Answer: It slowed down the metabolism of the cell. It was lethal.

>"When the stress is relieved, the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism," says University of Wyoming molecular biologist Thomas Boothby.

Article says different?

The slowing of cell metabolism is lethal. The fact you can restore individual cells to something close to "normal" at a later time, doesn't help. Your patient is dead and the cells eventually die anyway.

I am not convinced that the "normal" metabolism of the cell, afterward, is anything other than metabolic collapse.

But nobody was suggesting doing to this to an entire human. Pointing out that doing this would be lethal is a strawman. It's just research to move our understanding of how this works forwards a bit.

Some possible future applications that could arise from much more research were preserving tissue for organ transplants, or maybe in slowing down aging. But not using the current technique.

I hate clickbait titles like this.

Guess all we need to do now is build a spore drive, and go anywhere in the multiverse in an instant.

Hopefully they didn't do this with HeLa cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Contamination

I can imagine the contamination issue would only be made worse...

"We accidentally colonised Mars with Henrietta Lacks?" ;)

What could go wrong?

I'm wondering why they took the jump to human in vitro studies - did they do murine studies first?

Maybe we'll get a God Emperor of Dune

It’s a cell culture …

"in vitro"

It is orders of magnitude cheaper than a mouse study

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