>Previous studies have shown that cancer cells can use nanotubes like “tiny tentacles” to slurp up mitochondria from immune cells.
Biology is nuts.
Regarding messing with T-cells I wonder how evolution came up with the current number of mitochondria per cell. Usually with these things there's some kind of push and pull between the benefits of something and the drawbacks. Or sometimes it's just whatever works. I know mitochondria can have some negative impacts on cells sometimes by releasing the byproducts of metabolism (reactive oxygen species) or triggering programmed cell death.
Dunno about mitochondria as a cell feature specifically. But there exists a similar constraint on the total size of the DNA in the cell nucleus (and therefore the ability of a species to survive polyploid mutations that double-or-more the amount of DNA per cell); and I believe we do (think that we) understand the cause of that one.
This polyploidy constraint only exists for animal cells, not for plant cells. Plants can — and frequently do! — get as polyploid as they want; but animals have a ceiling.
And that implies that the constraint has something to do with one of the main differences between plant and animal cells: namely, the fact that animal cells — specifically, blood cells — must move and flow along channels composed of other cells; while plant cells are fixed in place by their stiff cellulose membranes, with only fluids and tissues flowing.
The problem animal cells have with polyploidy, is seemingly that it makes their cells physically larger — and in so doing, causes biological architectural assumptions like "blood cells can travel through narrow capillaries to deliver oxygen to cells within extremity tissues" to just fail to hold. The capillaries, when composed of larger cells, are narrower; and the blood cells flowing through, composed of larger cells, won't fit.
(Evolution could in theory resolve this single problem by just scaling all features up in size. But that causes far more problems than it solves: the square-cube law requires huge changes to things like muscles and metabolism to keep up with increased size, if it's even possible; and some organs/tissues just require to be a certain size to function — like the nephrons of the kidneys — such that these instead need to stay the same size, evolving distinct adaptations to handle the increased size of the cells that travel to/through them.)
The fun part is scaling the other way... for tiny animals.
https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-amoeba-s...
> You can't shrink down to the size of an amoeba without losing parts of yourself. That's the lesson one researcher is taking away from a microscopic analysis of the fairy wasp (Megaphragma mymaripenne), which at a mere 200 micrometers in length is one of the world's smallest animals (shown compared to a paramecium and amoeba above). When the scientist compared the neurons of adult and pupae fairy wasps, he discovered that more than 95% of adult neurons lack a nucleus.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14678...
> The smallest insects are comparable in size to unicellular organisms. Thus, their size affects their structure not only at the organ level, but also at the cellular level. Here we report the first finding of animals with an almost entirely anucleate nervous system. Adults of the smallest flying insects of the parasitic wasp genus Megaphragma (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae) have only 339–372 nuclei in the central nervous system, i.e., their ganglia, including the brain, consist almost exclusively of processes of neurons. In contrast, their pupae have ganglia more typical of other insects, with about 7400 nuclei in the central nervous system. During the final phases of pupal development, most neuronal cell bodies lyse. As adults, these insects have many fewer nucleated neurons, a small number of cell bodies in different stages of lysis, and about 7000 anucleate cells. Although most neurons lack nuclei, these insects exhibit many important behaviors, including flight and searching for hosts.
And the Wikipedia article for the species - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphragma_mymaripenne
In particular:
> Researchers believe the wasp can survive without nuclei because of its short lifespan; the proteins manufactured during the pupal stage last the animal long enough to complete its life journey.
Interesting, but not surprising — DNA, and the cellular nucleus itself, aren't truly required to make our cells "go". (At least over the span of a few days.)
That is, after all, what radiation poisoning is: a complete destruction of your DNA in your cells, while the cells themselves (attempt to) continue to function. And they do! For some number of days. And that's without any of our evolutionary ancestors ever having been under evolutionary pressure to live without DNA (as far as we know.)
IIRC, cell death from radiation poisoning follows a bathtub curve.
• There's firstly a lot of immediate cell death from apoptosis — probably due damaged DNA starting to do something that looks like cancer, and autolyse safeguards activating in response. This is what a radiation "burn" is.
• But then, after that, everything's actually fine for a while. You're just sitting there for a few days, operating normally — despite the majority of your cells now having massive holes shot through their DNA, with any attempt to unzip that DNA to copy it failing.
After that few days, you get massive waves of cell death — the part of radiation poisoning that actually kills you. This likely arrives, due to cells experiencing various inputs that they see as triggers to attempt some kind of state-transition (whether a minor one, between e.g. glucose vs ketone metabolism; or a major one, e.g. into mitosis.) And doing that requires flipping some epigenetic methylation switches to start producing different proteins — which requires the DNA be un-rolled and re-rolled. The cell tries it; it fails; and there's no "error handling" for the case of "you started a state transition but can't connect to the blueprint database", so the cell just "deadlocks" in a volatile state — e.g. one where metabolism is shut down, so purine waste builds up until the cell lyses for chemical reasons.
So it's not too surprising that an organism could evolve to just intentionally not trigger such cellular state-transitions — likely no longer expressing any of the state-transition "machinery" at all. Such an organism would get quite far with their cells just "doing the thing they were programmed to do", without a nucleus. Even cellular metabolism would continue!
There'd just be nowhere to get "replacement parts" for proteins as the original proteins break down or get oxidized by some radical — thus the lifespan limit.
Also, something not mentioned in what you linked, but which seems like an obvious corollary: I would guess that such organisms would likely be "metabolically fragile." I.e., they likely have dropped anything like adrenaline signalling, as the whole point of that is to get cells to state-transition. So they'll be a bit like a person taking alpha-blockers, who gets winded extremely easily because the drugs are preventing their cells from "gearing up." For this organism, there are no other gears to switch to. The organism is a fixie.
> IIRC, cell death from radiation poisoning follows a bathtub curve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident (this one is safe)
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81... (this is NSFL beyond a certain point)
> On a cold day of 2 December 2001, three inhabitants of Lia (later designated as Patients 1-DN, 2-MG and 3-MB) drove their truck approximately 45–50 km east of Lia to collect firewood. At around 18:00, they found two containers — metallic, cylindrical objects — lying on a forest path. Around them, the snow had curiously thawed within a radius of approximately 1 m, and the wet soil was steaming. All three individuals stated that the two, rather heavy, cylindrical objects (8–10 kg, 10 cm × 15 cm) were found by chance while carrying out their usual task of collecting firewood.
> One of the three men (Patient 3-MB) picked up one of the cylindrical objects and, finding that it was hot, dropped it immediately. They planned to place the gathered wood in their truck the next morning, and because it was getting dark, they decided to spend the night in the forest, using the hot objects they had discovered as personal heaters.
Section 6 on page 36 is where it gets NSFL. It only gets worse as you continue going through the timeline. There are pictures - they are not for the weak of stomach.
Section 4 is neat from the engineering perspective... "how do you move something that is radioactive enough to melt the snow around it?"
Jesus, that's rather awful. Guess these guys had never heard of radiation. Seems incredible, but I have no idea what the media was like in Georgia 20 years ago (or now, for that matter).
From listening to Michael Levin, he describes how in newts you can multiply the DNA of kidney cells (or some tubules around there). The cells become larger, so they adapt by forming the same size of tubule with fewer cells. If you keep duplicating the DNA, at some point a single cell is enough to form the tubule, which it does by bending around.
> blood cells can travel through narrow capillaries to deliver oxygen to cells within extremity tissues
Mammalian red blood cells do not have DNA or mitochondria. They lose them during the maturation process in the bone marrow.
But apparently this might just be one of the evolution's blind turns. Birds have even faster metabolism with higher oxygen requirements, and their red blood cells have nucleus.
When I say "blood cells", I mean "all blood cells", not specifically "red blood cells." Anywhere your blood plasma flows, all types of blood cells are carried along with it.
As such, to prevent infarction, every capillary in your body must be at least wide enough, in its narrowest state, to still accommodate the passage of the largest blood cell type the body produces, in its largest state. (Which, for us humans, is probably something like "a neutrophil that is bloated from just having consumed a large bacterium.")
The neutrophils and macrophages don't reliably know to exit the bloodstream when they're bloated?
Even if they did, they still might have ended up catching and eating the bacterium right at your fingertip. (Heck, that's not even an edge-case — fingertips and other extremeties served by the tiniest of bloodflow channels, get wounded and infected pretty often!)
Think of it like: what would civic street sizing regulations look like, if fire trucks — already the longest thing most residential streets need to accommodate — had to rapidly reconfigure and redeploy into an even longer shape, while sitting there on the street, to do their job; and then were stuck in this state until they made it back to the depot?
I see. Thanks.
I think derefr might be talking about the cells that form the walls of the capillaries being bigger, so you can't really fit them in the places you need them, and if you tried they'd be too narrow.
Except replace "you" with evolution and delete "tried".
> Regarding messing with T-cells I wonder how evolution came up with the current number of mitochondria per cell.
An over active immune is generally a bad thing for the host. Maybe a higher number increases auto immune disease?
Not just a bad thing - one of the worst possible things. That's how you get chronic inflammation.
Could it be just amount of energy available to the organism? Modern humans are in completely unique position relative to all history of life on Earth, having access to as much food (and energy) as we want, and having a widespread problem of eating too much. Evolution didn't have any chance to catch up with this reality.
> Regarding messing with T-cells I wonder how evolution came up with the current number of mitochondria per cell.
Cells can increase their number of mitochondria in response to things (mitochondrial biogenesis). I don't know anything about how that works out in the immune system, but have read about it related to fat cells and exercise.
This was also my first thought, and it seems like "giving them extra batteries" accomplishes the same outcome
I really appreciate the commentary here on HN. The headline was awful enough, but the quotes, really let me know the level of horror movie aesthetic there is in the commentary supposedly about biology.
Thanks, NewAtlas, but it's just not the mixed metaphor I'm looking for.
> Biology is nuts.
for this particular case I 100% agree. I grew up to accept a wide range of complexity at the cell level, but this blew through the roof.
> I wonder how evolution came up with the current number of mitochondria per cell
One of my probably-wrong ideas that I can't usefully ask* is if chronic fatigue/post-acute infection syndromes may be due to insufficient mitochondria for whatever reason.
* if I ask StackExchange, I'll probably phrase it wrong enough to have it closed; if I ask an LLM then it will probably make something up because if the answer exists at all it is probably behind a paywall, and even if it isn't they do that 10-20% of them time anyway.
Closure on a Stack Exchange site isn't supposed to be permanent: it just means "this question isn't answerable (by us) yet". Maybe try, and see what happens?
imagine feeding cancer anti mitochondria
> The team cultured BMSCs and T cells together, and after 48 hours found that up to a quarter of the T cells had gained extra mitochondria. The researchers dubbed these juiced up immune cells Mito+.
What an incredibly simple idea. Just scale it up.
How many do you have to have before you can start using the Force?
A more direct reference, though maybe obscure these days, is _Parasite_ _Eve_
"Whatever the stupid, lazy writers at Disney needed it to be this week." - The Critical Drinker*
* I imagine
Totally a tangent, but he's right about that. It was a flaw in Harry Potter as well. There was no logical system to how magic worked; spells did whatever plot requirements said they did. And it detracts from the sense of realism in a world when the magic just does whatever is needed at the moment.
Acknowledging it is a children’s book…
I take significantly bigger issue with the lack of societal change from having magic. Way too much of wizard society was “Muggles + occasional party tricks”. When you can conjure food, water, automatons, etc from nothing, nature of living would change completely.
You can brew luck? I would be mainlining that stuff every day. Time travel is given to children? Why is there a train when there are a dozen different ways of magicking yourself around the world?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality touched on these inconsistencies.
But. It's. Magic.
Magic can do anything. That's why it's magic. How does it work? Magic. It's a perfectly complete circle in logic.
The very much NSFW web comic Oglaf had a strip about this.
In this rare instance, the comic is SFW, but still be wary. https://www.oglaf.com/claret/
Compare to, say, "A Wizard of Earthsea", where magic is explained in a different way that points out that while a wizard could transmute one substance into another, no wizard would, because of the far-reaching ramifications.
The system was not fully elucidated by any means, but the subtlety of it was suggested by such things as Ged deducing that the doorkeeper was one of the seven masters of Roke.
Sounds like most religions. And most modern folks having issues with religions they were brought up in don't have this as their main issue with it.
One addresses child's imagination which just wants to be wowed, the other our eternal fear of unknown and death.
Well, magic still needs to follow some kind of rules for it to be usable. Otherwise "magic" would just be something random (or maybe chaotic - we just haven't figured out the rules well enough).
Or, you can do the Brandon Sanderson thing, and have a comprehensive system that has limits and a consistent expression of magical power.
but then it's no longer magic. it now becomes some sort of metaphysical science. magic is magic. once you understand it, it is no longer magic.
I don't think kids enjoy Harry Potter for the sense of realism...
What the Harry Potter books have is very well written characters, and character stories, and a great sense of adventure and fascination.
That's probably what he would say. The actual minimum to be able to use the force is a 7000 midichlorian count.
I thought it was over 9000.
Wrong franchise
Less than you’d think. Not even master Yoda has a mitochondria count that high!
"The midichlorian is the forcehouse of the cell."
Batteries == Mitochondira
So I wondered how one could increase the number of mitochondria and quickly found this nice piece from 2017 about promoting mitochondrial fission in mid-life (ok in fruit flys):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00525-4
I'm pretty sure maintaining mitochondrial health will help a lot of health problems. They seem to come up every little while in regard to many different pathologies.
> So I wondered how one could increase the number of mitochondria
Lots of Zone-2 training. Inigo San-Milan & George Brooks are the two researchers to look at this for in humans.
Their research seems to be in relation to muscle and fat - not the immune system and cancer. I wouldn't expect zone 2 training to improve "T cell exhaustion" where mitochondria are stolen from T-cells by cancer cells.
> Previous studies have shown that cancer cells can use nanotubes like “tiny tentacles” to slurp up mitochondria from immune cells.
Completely spitballing here, but if bone marrow cells help charge up mitochondria (as this new study suggests), then strong healthy bones are a good defense against cancer. Resistance training (weightlifting being the most common variety) is well known to improve bone health so maybe this is another reason to practice it.
Maybe the reason elephants don't get more cancer despite their comparatively large cell count.
They don't get cancer because they have a metric f ton of tumour suppressor genes copies, and we have relatively few and so it's easier for all of ours to get knocked off to form a cancer
Yeah, batteries was a funny metaphor given that everybody from my generation learned that Mitochondria are the "powerhouse of the cell" in Junior High.
From the headline, I was almost sure it was going to be about giving T-cells ATP, which is much more commonly (and appropriately) analogized to biological batteries.
Or maybe you want to create Parasite Eve? :-)
For people who want to learn biochemsistry and subsequently be in awe and the complexity and mechanisms, there's a great beginner book, The Machinery of Life. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6601267-the-machinery-of...
I found my way there after an Alan Kay video -- OPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet: https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1787
On the subject of awe, here's another from Kurszsegat - The Most Complex Language in the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPFenJQciw
> Intriguingly, Mito+ cells could multiply quickly and pass their extra mitochondria to the new cells.
Isn't that a risk of leukemia? One that could've killed the mice, but after more than the 60 days of the study?
But even 60+ days vs. 20 days is better, so...
Related, a seventh person has been "cured" (article quotes) of HIV/AIDS after a stem cell transplant:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/seventh-person-cu...
The donor had 2 copies of the CCR5 gene, which resulted in HIV not being able to enter immune cells (like T cells) as efficiently, giving them time to fight it off.
In America, batteries are have cells. In Soviet Russa^W^W Poorly Written Headlines, cells have batteries.
Given the American penchant for productizing anything even vaguely health-related, I expect to soon see on supermarket shelves some sort of "Mitochondria Milkshake", jam-packed with mitochondria.
> Intriguingly, Mito+ cells could multiply quickly and pass their extra mitochondria to the new cells.
Is this accurate? I thought T cells can't multiply.
It seems T cells do not continuously divide by mitosis in their mature state but can undergo controlled proliferation when activated by an antigen:
For what type(s) of cancer does this seem to be promising?
Mostly blood cancers. It's not quite there for solid tumors.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth...
This is why good quality nutrition is so important. It's like giving all of our cells--not just T cells--extra batteries.
To be fair, I'd prefer not to give the cancer cells extra batteries.
A common goal, but tumors mutate and bypass a lot of normal cell functions. Keep in mind that when dying cancer patients starve in the end, the tumors don't slow.
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/study-unveils-new-way-starve...
https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2024/05/02/drug-shows...
https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/01/30/starving-cancer...
> Keep in mind that when dying cancer patients starve in the end, the tumors don't slow.
That's something I don't understand. If cancer cells grow faster then I suppose they should be more affected by the lack of nutrients. I know that this model is too simplistic to be true, but I don't know what exactly is missing from it.
In truth, it's usually the opposite when our bodies are fueled properly.
I thought I remembered something about certain nutrients (magnesium?) being something you could intentionally reduce to slow down cancer growth -- kind of like a DIY chemotherapy; your cells need Mg to grow and multiply, but cancer cells need it more. Paired with other treatments, where applicable, the reduced nutrient diet had positive clinical outcomes.
Define "quality nutrition" and cite a source.
"Quality nutrition" is any scientifically backed research results on good health.
Here is a resource that uses research to back up its claims: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/dietary-reference...
And it has a good tool to find and meet those results: https://multimedia.efsa.europa.eu/drvs/index.htm
The comment I was replying to made a specific claim that I was referring to.
Regarding your definition of quality nutrition, you'll have to be more specific. You can find scientific research to support nearly any dietary choice.
My health has been improving by eating according to this book:
Really? Most clinical trials for nutritional therapy as a cancer treatment haven't produced significant results.
This is a surprising position.
Can you link to any?
Everything I have read on the subject says obesity, a nutritional imbalance, is one of the main contributors to cancer growth, and specifically a reduction in sugar and meat have significant positive results in combating cancer's growth.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9559313/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9775518/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/0470869976....
We might know what causes some growth, but it's not homogeneous, and we certainly can't stop it with diet alone once it starts.
https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2019/10/keto-f...
>> But Mukherjee’s August 2018 paper in Nature also found that a ketogenic diet was helpful — even “synergistic” — with certain cancers and certain treatments. At least in mice.
>> “It’s probably most helpful in cancers that utilize the PIK3CA / AKT / MTOR pathway [an intracellular signaling pathway]”
Weird I feel like I read the opposite, that a high protein/fat diet would slow cancer because it thrives on glucose, so cutting carbs/sugar was key.
It seems counter intuitive to me that meat & sugar would both be correlated because they are almost opposites from a metabolic standpoint. One is pure fat/protein and one is just glucose.
There is no reliable evidence that red meat consumption increases cancer risk. You are spreading medical misinformation by incorrectly interpreting low-quality observational studies.
How is this related to the number of mitochondria in a cell?
I believe that the opposite is useful, fasting -> autophagy -> improved mitochondrial health (not sure). Maybe that's what parent tried to say.
nah. let's base the entire world diet on numbers of calories, provided by crops which are collected annually or biannually so we can have an efficient futures market :thumbsupemoji
Yep, we prefer to keep people alive first since its hard to care about the health and well being of dead people.
i can't tell if you lost critical thinking entirely or trolling
Incredible result, but my god do I hate this kind of headline.
Why? As a laymen (who knows nothing about "T cells") the analogy helps
Come on, T cells, you can do it
..in mice
Great! When can I buy Mitochondria Supplements at the grocery store? /s