I think this might count as endosymbiosis replicated in a lab: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30373839/
118 karma · joined May 6, 2020
And shockingly, it worked! The engineered bacteria replaced the natural mitochondria in the yeast. Wild.
But I guess to answer your question more directly, the cells that don't have the mitochondria would more likely die, because they don't have the fitness advantage.
Would this be cannibalism?
You could use RNA demethylases from other organisms for sure, but it's a really interesting and weird concept, whether people would consider eating a plant expressing human proteins to be taboo.
Check out Larry Moran's blog [1, 2] if you want to to hear the other side of the story. He maintains that most of the human genome IS junk, and I find his arguments compelling.
[1] A representative article: https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2013/07/five-things-you-should...
[2] Rabbit hole warning, all of his Junk DNA posts: https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna...
This finding recently made a big splash at AChemS 2021 (the annual meeting for the Association for Chemoreception Sciences). And it actually is a really big deal. A protein structure is extremely information rich, telling you where all of the atoms of a given protein are (ish). Before this finding, there were NO structures of any olfactory receptor, and historically the publication of the first structure of a given biomolecule has been a watershed moment for that field (insulin, ribosome, many other examples).
What's more, they used the structural information to rationally engineer their olfactory receptor, expanding the binding pocket and changing how the receptor responds to different odorants. That was pretty much impossible to do before this. So, this is a pretty huge finding, and will definitely encourage more structural work on olfactory receptors in the future.
If I had to poke a hole in this finding, it would be that insect olfactory receptors are substantially different from mammalian olfactory receptors. But in my opinion, it seems that the buzz about this paper is definitely justified. Very cool!
But this is wildly inefficient. Plant genomes are often ridiculously large (e.g., the onion genome is 4X the size of the human genome), so you either have to throw a bunch of mutagen on the plant (which can cause off-target, toxic mutations) and/or plant a bunch of seedlings to get the plant you're looking for.
New methods often include introducing new genes with mutations through agrobacteria, gold nanoparticle bombardment, etc. without needing to actually mutagenize a plant genome. Do your mutagenesis on a specific gene in bacteria, and then test those random genetic variants in plants.
But for me, what is more exciting is a relatively new shift toward targeted mutagenesis directly in plants. For example, CRISPR can be used to target mutations to specific genes in situ (and not insertions or deletions -- useful point mutations through the use of base editors) [0]. I think the directed evolution of plants will be a pretty fruitful (lol) area of research in the future, and I'm excited to see where that field goes. Gotta love new plants!
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-020-00288-9 -- see section "Mutagenesis and directed evolution"
I totally agree, it's a feature not a bug. A wide spectrum is absolutely an essential feature for an animal to sense thousands (to millions) of different chemicals without thousands (to millions) of different receptors. So, calling olfactory receptors "just plain horrible proteins" was a bit rude to them, haha!
However, in my opinion, digital sensors based on olfactory receptors have and will continue to suffer from such wide spectra and poor sensitivities.
Digital chemical sensing is hard, and yet biological chemical sensing is amazing. Understandably, there's always been immense interest in digitizing the biological process of smell. People have been pitching various technologies, from the early days of the WaspHound[0] and DARPA's largely failed RealNose project[1], to current efforts from startups[2] and big players in perfumery[3].
It is my opinion that all of these technologies are solving the wrong problem. Olfactory receptors are just plain horrible proteins. They're extremely difficult to produce, and even when you can express them, they have exactly the wrong type of properties. Each olfactory receptor responds to many different chemicals with really bad sensitivity. While that works really well for animals, these properties are a nightmare for digitization.
If we want to digitize chemical sensing, I believe we will need better proteins than naturally occurring olfactory receptors. And that's what I am trying to do currently in my Ph.D. research!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera_training [1] https://www.defensedaily.com/darpa-awards-contracts-for-sens... [2] https://yesse.tech/ [3] https://www.firmenich.com/company/research