Tunnelling Nanotubes: Life's Secret Network

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026821.400-tunnelling-nanotubes-lifes-secret-network.html?full=true

by qaexl • 18 years ago

10 4 18 years ago

If tunnelling nanotubes are real and widespread as the article and cited articles claim, we are in front of a major, once-in-a-century discovery in biology.

Basically, the assumption that cells are enclosed units with isolated internal cytoplasm--the very definition of the word 'cell', over 100 years old--would no longer hold.

As the article explains, medicine is up for a review. Many aspects of protein prions, HIV, and who knows how many other illnesses are suddenly explainable.

qaexl2• 18 years ago

Stem cell researches have found that in order to grow a healthy organ, the progenitor cells must be in a certain physical arrangement. For example, bladder stem cells won't produce a bladder unless it is in some sort of rough surface. The tunnelling nanotubes can certainly explain this.

There are also other engineering disciplines that analyzes biology as a source of inspiration. I think abstracting the concept of transit, hidden networks will go a long way towards constructing self-building nanotechs.

mad44• 18 years ago

Now network science and graph algorithms might have some applications in explaining some of the biological phenomena.

Watkins thinks that the dendritic cells could be using nanotubes to recruit other cells. Conventional wisdom says that once a dendritic cell is activated, it migrates to the lymph nodes to alert the immune system. Sometimes, it might have to travel from the tip of one's finger to the armpit - a long and perilous journey that could result in failure. But if a dendritic cell first recruits other sentinels, and all of them march towards the lymph nodes simultaneously, there is much less chance of the message being lost. "It allows you to amplify the response," says Watkins. "That's all hypothesis really. We have to prove it."

qaexl2• 18 years ago

I know someone who was using graph algorithims to study biological phonomena. Given a set of correlations, say, Protein A correlates significantly with Protein B, but inversely proportional to Protein C, what is the minimal graph that describes the relationships among Proteins A, B, and C? The bioinformatics folks apparently have been doing this for a while now.

What will be interesting is how the presence of tunnels affect these analysis, or better yet, whether mining the data would reveal the presence of the tunnelling nanotubes.

Tunnelling Nanotubes: Life's Secret Network

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