Proteins let cells remember how well their last division went | Hacker News Reader

Proteins let cells remember how well their last division went

arstechnica.com

114 pointsdonatzsky11 comments

I recall reading an article about how E. coli or elegans or something has the ability to amplify signals 1000x through nothing than a clever biological configuration. The fact that proteins have “memory” blows my mind. It’s interesting how the macro scale emulates the micro scale.

> I recall reading an article about how E. coli or elegans or something has the ability to amplify signals 1000x through nothing than a clever biological configuration.

Signal transduction pathways do that! This is happening in you right now at massive scale. This is how your senses work. This is how everything works.

> The fact that proteins have “memory” blows my mind. It’s interesting how the macro scale emulates the micro scale.

Your DNA has memories at all sorts of temporal resolutions. Generational, cell lineage, temporary, etc. Almost every little biochemical system has equations of state, amplification, memory.

Biochemistry is a world of computation.

A thought exercise I read once blew my mind.

Imagine a spaceship lands that has the most advanced technology that is constructed from abundant molecules, self powered off the planets resources, renews, repairs, and can adapt itself according to the environment's elements. and multiples at no-loss while passes learnings forward to other manifestations of the technology. the door of the spaceship opens, and lo and behold the technology is biological life as we see today.

This is a fantastic lay person explanation of how it works. https://jsomers.net/e-coli-chemotaxis/

That's indeed fantastic. It also gave me perspective on something: the reasons there are so many interactions is because of the number of collisions: a water molecule will collide 10^14 times in a second. Mind-boggling stuff.

for me this is an example of informative back pressure. the protiens make sure the cells pay attention to what just happened to allow for changes that could improve things in the future. If you like the sound of big V8's what's appealing is the backpressure signaling that the engine is healthy and capable.

There was this article on backpressure on here and it's been siting with me. I've been applying it to other articles about data flow.

https://medium.com/@jayphelps/backpressure-explained-the-flo...

> Consistent with this idea, all three of the proteins in the complex are tumor suppressors, meaning that mutations in them make tumor formation more likely. The researchers confirmed that the mitotic stopwatch was frequently defective in tumor samples.

It seems possible that this is not the only 'stopwatch' mechanism, if some/most tumor samples don't have a defective version of it. If there were two or more for redundancy, then all of them being defective would make tumors more likely.

To call this memory seems like a stretch. By the logic of the article, every daughter cell has 'memory' of the parent cell because some proteins from the parent cell are present in the daughter cell. I would be curious to see p53 complex concentration as a function of cell generation/mitosis time to show how durable this 'memory' actually is.

If those proteins are mutable and have an impact on child cell function, I'd call that memory :)

Why those things specifically?

Now cells have a carry flag?

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