
Cells Talk in a Language That Looks Like Viruses - omarkn
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cells-talk-in-a-language-that-looks-like-viruses-20180502/
======
teaspoons
The idea that viruses are self-contained entities separate from the organisms
they infect is an artifact of the human mind's power-saving system of
modelling the world in terms of functional-decomposition. Viruses are non-
living extraorganism messages crucial as a source of novelty in evolution.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to find cures for them.

~~~
stephengillie
It's as though the vesicles are email, and viruses are spam.

Previously on HN:

800 million viruses fall onto every square meter of Earth every day. They kill
20% of bacterial life every day. [0]

Video simulation of HIV infecting a cell and reproducing. [1]

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16982396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16982396)

~~~
noonespecial
Worse than spam. They're like that chain email all your relatives kept
forwarding you about Bill Gates giving you a trip to Disney World if you sent
it on to 10 other people.

~~~
derefr
Viruses are memes. Something that a cell hears, and then can't stop repeating.

~~~
ajuc
If the messages between cells are e-mail, then viruses are computer viruses.
The analogy is almost perfect - it's information that uses security holes to
cause the host to produce and send copies of it.

~~~
stephengillie
And eventually the computer explodes, spreading email spam everywhere. Oh,
wait.

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TheRealPomax
The statement "There are fundamental differences between viruses and vesicles:
Viruses can replicate and vesicles cannot" seems either paraphrased or dumbed
down. Viruses can be replicated by cells, but they certainly cannot themselves
replicate. And it's literally that kind of nitpicking that keeps science on
track.

~~~
mannykannot
The distinction, I think, is the matter of where the genome resides. Viruses
have their own genome; they need to hijack the mechanisms of cells to
reproduce, but it is their genome that is being replicated and disseminated.
For a vesicle, however, it seems that the genetic instructions for creating
them are part of the cell's genome, and those instructions do not get copied
into the vesicle (at least, not in a form that can get itself replicated) even
in the case of vesicles containing some RNA.

I would think that even if there was a form of bacterial sex that involved
using vesicles as the medium for exchanging genetic material, that would not
necessarily be virus-like unless the genetic material being transferred was
capable of promoting the creation of vesicles containing copies of itself by
the receiving bacterium. I don't know if that case would be distinguishable
from a virus.

~~~
TheRealPomax
I know, I was pointing out that the phrasing "viruses can replicate" is
incorrect in every sense of that active verb "to replicated". They can be
replicated, and there is a non-trivial difference between those two
descriptions that matter to this scientific explanation.

~~~
random314
Really? If you don't have anything to contribute to a discussion, please don't
drum up noise. Splitting hairs over whether a virus replicates or is
replicated is just spamming the forum!

I understand that with a wide enough audience, attention seekers will make
some noise about some minutae they know that isn't relevant to the discussion.
Don't be THAT guy.

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yread
It's mindblowing that we can now directly image these vesicles
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4448148/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4448148/)

~~~
heyitsguay
We can in fact image them in multiple ways! Check out these super high
resolution images of vesicles on a cell wall - the honeycomb bits are the
vesicles' clathrin cages:
[https://taraskalab.nhlbi.nih.gov/media/](https://taraskalab.nhlbi.nih.gov/media/)

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jcims
Apologies if I got this from HN, as I can’t remember the source, but the video
halfway down this page shows the complexity of viral replication:

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/watch-
the-...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/watch-the-life-
cycle-of-hiv-in-colorful-new-detail/)

The article hints at some of the same mechanisms for extracellular vesicles.
If that’s the case then maybe they are more closely related than outwardly
expressed in the copy.

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carapace
I strongly recommend "A Planet of Viruses" by Carl Zimmer

[http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo222...](http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo22228819.html)

There are viruses that enter a host, merge with its DNA, replicate along with
it for generations just like "normal" DNA. Eventually, it can "wake up", cut
itself out of the host genes, and start replicating as a virus again.

Some of our DNA is apparently made out of viruses that did this and got stuck.

The model that emerges from consideration of recent discoveries is something
like, bacteria and viruses form a single global organism that is the primary
resident of this planet (by mass, by throughput, etc.)

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neilk
I’m no biologist but this seems to blow a lot of things wide open.

Since these vesicles resemble viruses, is it possible for them to be a form of
organism-to-organism communication? Accidental, or intentional?

Might there be pathogens that MITM vesicles en route? Rip them open and plant
another message inside, and send them along?

~~~
RoyTyrell
> Might there be pathogens that MITM vesicles en route? Rip them open and
> plant another message inside, and send them along?

Seems like they do something effectively the same. Here's an excerpt from the
article:

 _... retroviruses also drape a second layer over their protein shell by
wrapping themselves in pieces of their host’s cell membrane. The host-derived
membrane protects the virus from discovery by the immune system_

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whataretensors
> More recently, however, scientists discovered that cells could package their
> molecular information in what are known as extracellular vesicles.

Seems like cells then need some type message-response mechanism. It could be
that there's an incidental minmax game happening at a cellular level, leading
to types of intelligence that we don't understand at all but maybe can be
modeled.

I think this creates incredible disruption opportunities for drugs and
healthcare if AI can augment the intelligence of a cell in the long term.

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jdonaldson
The article describes vesicles as a sort of language, I always thought of them
as a cellular routing mechanism.

Whatever they are, I think they're super interesting. I named one of my
routing libraries after a related organelle:
[https://github.com/jdonaldson/golgi](https://github.com/jdonaldson/golgi)

~~~
RoyTyrell
Similar for me, but they seem like a literal (network) packet than a routing
algorithm/system.

~~~
jdonaldson
Yeah, in my analogy a vesicle is a special kind of ADT-wrapped result, and the
Golgi instance does the routing.

~~~
jdonaldson
Also fwiw I dropped the name vesicle from API and docs because I didn't think
anybody would understand the connection. Now I'm inclined to add it back in.

~~~
RoyTyrell
Wait, what? Are... are you God?

~~~
jdonaldson
I've watched the original Ghostbusters, so yes.

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foxyv
Imagine how cool a story it would be if viruses were just a weapon developed
by intelligent microscopic life. Relics of an ancient war who's history is
written in the telomeres of our DNA in an encoding which we cannot decipher.

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swsieber
So... cancer is to tissue as viruses are to cell messaging?

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rs86
This is obvious.

