DNA Dethroned - Inheritance is Protein-Based.

originally posted by: Puppylove
a reply to: ssenerawa

...we're complicated organisms, and it's a little from column A and a little from column B like with most things.

People are obsessed with all or nothings.

Worth repeating.

and

a reply to: soficrow

You could very well be right indeed.

Thanks for the links, good read!

And where does the information to code these prions come from?

a reply to: soficrow

It's interesting to hear that more than just genes are responsible for what is inherited in their offspring, however it is probably wrong to say that genes have nothing to do with what is inherited.

a reply to: soficrow

This post shows you have no idea what you are talking about. You are extremely confused on what exactly prions can effect epigenetically.

I suggest you start with the basics:

en.m.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: AshFan

The water bear thing would be great, seeing as how winters coming to my neck of the woods, gets to -30 around here before the wind chill.

I like threads that make me aware of how little I know.
Just for the record, it is a possibility that one of my distant relatives bred with a Sasquatch.
People in my family tend to be inordinately strong and durable pound for pound.
Maybe it's just the Irish blood.

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: soficrow

Is this something in tune with "racial memory"?

Not sure if 'racial memory' is the proper term to apply. It would appear possible that there could be such a thing as inherited memory.
Never had to teach a dog that a rattlesnake is to be avoided, for example.

originally posted by: nOraKat
a reply to: soficrow

...it is probably wrong to say that genes have nothing to do with what is inherited.

Agreed.

My Nanny died of CJD (mad cow) in 1993. I was young but I remember it clearly. There wasn't a lot of information for my mother back then and they said she could have it in her depending on when my Nanny was infected

a reply to: skunkape23

Inherited memory.

A much more appropriate term. Thank you.

originally posted by: raymundoko
a reply to: soficrow

This post shows you have no idea what you are talking about. You are extremely confused on what exactly prions can effect epigenetically.

You mean the scientists I quoted and referenced (biologists, microbiologists, physicists, etc.) have no idea what they are talking about.

I suggest you start with the basics:

en.m.wikipedia.org...

I prefer Pubmed, .edu sites and Lindquist's and Aguzzi's labs for up-to-date info on prions - and prions' role in memory, adaptation and evolution - over wikipedia.

a reply to: swanne

Read your blog on the soul just before my computer crashed (an event that occurs only but routinely when I frequent ATS) - love your ideas about neural networks and dark matter. ...Years ago when physicists first started working with microbiologists to understand protein folding there was speculation that proteins flipped into other dimensions during the process. Can't get my hands on any references, but that's the gist of the hypothesis. Don't know what happened with it.

...Wonder if you can link prions with dark matter. lol

originally posted by: dr1234
And where does the information to code these prions come from?

From the prions themselves, via their structure - that's the cool thing.

...prions are infectious agents devoid of instructional nucleic acid [1]. They propagate themselves without a genetic code, instead enciphering their infectious nature structurally, within the protein conformation itself.

…unlike other infective agents such as bacteria, protozoa, and viruses, they don't contain any genetic material. No DNA or RNA. Prions are just misfolded proteins but they are capable of spreading, causing disease, and evolving.

...prions contain no DNA or RNA, the building blocks of the genetic code.

Warning: Wall of text ahead!

a reply to: theantediluvian
a reply to: soficrow

Thanks for the thread OP - really brain tickling.

I don't know a whole lot about how information is stored in proteins. But, I do understand a bit about, well, bits.

For the sake of clarity and not pedantics: A bit is the smallest unit of information and our notion of the bit has recently been applied to the realm of the atom, the smallest possible unit of matter and is 1 nm (nanometer) in size. Cool, right?

Again, not being pedantic. I am sure a lot of people understand this but for the sake of clarity: We like to put bits in groups of 8 and call that group a byte. When we want to have bytes represent meaningful information, we have to apply an encoding scheme, which in the case of classical computing (not quantum) is binary, 1 or 0, and placement of each bit and that bits state (1 or 0) in each byte can then be made to represent byte as a number (0-255), which then can be passed on to further encoding along with other bytes. Do enough of this fast enough and a lot at once and you have a computer (in a nutshell).

In a sense(and this is where I might be totally off base), an atom (smallest piece of matter) = a bit (smallest piece of information)

In the article above, each hole that the chlorine atom can "fall" into represents the state, and which side it exists on determines the state of the atom (1 or 0) in relation to it's position on the base material (copper) which totaled 1kB. The field that the atoms could "fall" into was 96 nm x 126 nm in size. But we can just focus on the the blocks of 8x8 bits, which can contain up to 64 bits of information, or 8 bytes. Their physical size in nm directly correlates to the amount of information that can be stored.

As per google, a prion is 10nm. So, my reasoning (which could be absolutely wrong) is that a prion can hold a little more than one of our bytes of information. That's not much. In fact its not enough to represent a single English character to a modern computer in unicode-16.

But, to a prion, that might be a whole lot of potential depending on how it encodes itself in order to manipulate a cell. As to memories, I really don't know, but I can speculate.

In my mind, a memory, such as an instinct to be wary of water, would be an insanely huge amount of classic, bit based information even when the "computer" (organism) is set up for that information. I say that because scientists have estimated that the human brain contains 2.5 petabytes of "storage potential" in the sense of binary data. But, the only reason we have so much storage potential is because of the massive network of connections that each potential bit (neuron) has and how much one bit (neuron) can change a vast array of them. Also, we are just starting to understand how the brain represents information in the form of anything meaningful to the organism. So, we don't know how our brain "encodes" in the sense of how we've designed computers. In other words, no Rosetta stone for our brain has been discovered/designed yet.

If the prion uses information like a neuron would, there could be a lot more potential to the prion than my measly 10 bits.
That said, I really haven't a clue on how proteins in general and prions in specific "handle" their information, I just have an understanding of how information is handled via computers in the bit form to represent meaningful things to us.

I hope this makes sense, I am just trying to apply the idea of information to the topic at hand. The OP is no small discovery, it adds to one of our great endeavors in science: finding the blueprints of life.

Thanks for reading and I hope this contributed something to discussion.

a reply to: OrdoAdChao

......If the prion uses information like a neuron would, there could be a lot more potential to the prion than my measly 10 bits.
That said, I really haven't a clue on how proteins in general and prions in specific "handle" their information

Great stuff. Thank you! Sorry - off to a dinner, no time to do your post justice. But...As far as prions go, the "lock and key" mechanism -and 'bit' analogy - seem not to apply. As you say, more like a neural network. Prions' information is held in their shape - and they shape shift. When they do, an entirely different array of information 'surfaces.' Plus, they have arms that can shape shift too.

This article is from 2003 but is a good overview of how things prion work, might work. (Later, and thanks again.)

Conformational diversity and protein evolution – a 60-year-old hypothesis revisited

Complex organisms have evolved from a limited number of primordial genes and proteins. However, the mechanisms by which the earliest proteins evolved and then served as the origin for the present diversity of protein function are unknown. Here, we outline a hypothesis based on the ‘new view’ of proteins whereby one sequence can adopt multiple structures and functions. We suggest that such conformational diversity could increase the functional diversity of a limited repertoire of sequences and, thereby, facilitate the evolution of new proteins and functions from old ones.

……The ‘new view’ of proteins has prompted the revision of many facets of protein science. Here, we have outlined the intriguing implications that this ‘new view’ might have for protein evolution. The hypotheses described are supported by many properties of today’s proteins, including the recent demonstration of a linkage between conformational diversity and multi-specificity in antibodies [16] (Fig. 2). Moreover, although present-day enzymes do not necessarily retain the activities of their evolutionary precursors, it appears that enzymes that retain both the original and a newly evolved activity can be readily generated in the test tube [40,41].

… The newly discovered prions …were strongly attracted to DNA molecules and they featured long, floppy "arms" able to fold in a wide variety of ways.

a reply to: soficrow

But don't you read? ...We already are zombies - because of GMO's!

I am in denial. Twenty odd years ago I seriously thought about not having children for many of these reasons

just posting to keep track of this thread

a reply to: soficrow

Terrific thread and a very interesting development with regards to prions. I will be reading up quite a bit on these little guys.

This seems to be yet another reason why the current framework first established by the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis in the 40's then updated in the 60's needs to be reevaluated and changed. It's outdated and does not account for the new ways heritable information can be passed between generations.

I've long been a proponent of pivoting the primary influence on heredity away from traditional Mendelian principles toward more non Mendelian mechanisms. This is not to say that we should abandon Mendelian concepts since it's certain that genetic information does get passed via DNA. However, it is abundantly clear that it doesn't adequately explain all the phenotypic variation we see in nature.

Epigenetics seems to be able to address some of these gaps in our understanding of how organisms function and ultimately evolve. Instinct, for instance, is not well explained or understood using the traditional mechanisms (such as mutation), and seems to me to be better explained as an acquired behavior (through learning) that can be passed down to offspring epigenetically. The idea that such behaviors, which are many times perfectly suited to an environment, are the result of the good timing of a random mutation seems tenuous – unless more research reveals that behaviors can in fact induce genetic mutations via methylation. But then this is Lamark all over again....

Either way this is of great interest to me and I will be following these developments about prions for sure.

Fantastic thread. Something to consider and think about, for sure.

Makes you wonder if space travel is even really possible for us while we are biological in nature. Would prionic diseases in response to various off earth environments cause insanity or death?

Or would evolution take the opportunity to explode again?