Neonatal fungi: lifelong metabolic health via macrophage β cell development | Hacker News Reader

Neonatal fungi: lifelong metabolic health via macrophage β cell development

science.org

76 pointsgnabgib10 comments

It's interesting that "external" entities like microbiota play a role in the host's lifelong development. But it's more interesting that this is interesting - life is emergent, whatever result we observe exists by accident and because it worked.

Our understanding of these phenomena rely on us building models and abstractions to assist in us managing the complexity of the minutiae. But as we've seen in this particular study, the minutiae matter and sometimes our own incomplete models can come to box our own thinking.

As the saying goes - all models are wrong, some are useful...

The endosymbiotic theory suggests that there is considerable overlap in functions with what you would call "external" entities. At some point we might just consider these things part of the host system, even if they don't share the particular DNA of your nuclei. At the scale of trillions of organisms working together it becomes really hard to tell what is "you" and what isn't.

Yes! Feels like our concept of an individual gets blurrier the more detail we get:

Plants are not truly separate, they are connected via fungal networks - the "wood wide web".

Lichen are not one species, they are made of a cooperative of fungus, yeast, bacteria, and sometimes archea. All 3 domains of life combined into one "organism"! The fungus is generally seen to be the primary entity, using the bacteria to get energy from photosynthesis and in turn protecting them with a durable casing.

It really looks like humans (and every other animal) are symbiotic organisms similar to lichen. The gut microbiome and the mitochondria that live inside us don't share our DNA and have behaviors independent of us. They provide us energy using aerobic metabolism and we protect them by hosting them in our stomach or cell walls.

Even the "we" in that last sentence is carry a lot of assumptions. It's an evolutionary process, not the conscious effort of an individual.

It’s a very cool in comparison to the standard train of thought. Human beings are just as much ecosystems as we are organisms.

Well yeah exactly! This starts becoming even more important as we start doing more and more unnatural stuff. Like if we started doing births in test tubes we may find out a whole bunch of edge cases arise because of "external" factors.

On a less crazy sci fi issue, I've seen murmurs that sugar alternatives like aspartame can still have effects on your microbiota

I don't know, the more I learn about mitochondria, the more crazy sci-fi it sounds! Sometimes it feels like they're calling the shots and our bodies are just their spaceship.

Without our gut bacteria/biome, we’re cooked. Not surprising there are other cases as well. How important are eyelash mites?

This is pretty interesting, also that they get it down to the amount of mannan in the fungal cell walls being somehow related to the β cell amounts. There's probably a nice project in here to figure out what the receptors are on the macrophages that are modulating this process. Obviously candidates would be some of the lectins they carry (mannose receptor?).

These are fungi in the gut, as far as I understand. Seems weird that they would affect the pancreas. Wonder if that is the case in adults too? (not affect development, but some other effects)

Fungal impact on nervous and endocrine system is not weird at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com