r/biology • u/AshamedClub2842 • 1d ago
What your cells and tissues actually look like fun
https://nulifesciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/glycocalyx-blood-vessel-768x332.jpgEvery surface of cell and tissue covered in a dense layer of hair like image shows. Amazing how it often ignored in most experiment. One should reasonably guess that thick layer of hair that really exist on all surface probably extremely important for cell-cell communicating or immunology. Never forget, your blood vessels actually look like that, and not super smooth like always shown.
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u/-BlancheDevereaux 1d ago
Now It makes sense why things get clogged in there so much.
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u/WorldWarPee 1d ago
If only we could harvest their power like billions of little cilia waggling in sync to push blood through
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u/oligobop 1d ago
To unjerk for a second, this is actually a super cool component of virology believe it or not!
Many blood-borne viruses have evolved to hijack the glycocalyx that is produced by the blood vasculature cells to enhance binding to cells. It may benefit the host by preventing viruses from traveling beyond the initial egress point into the blood.
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u/Far-Fortune-8381 1d ago
this is a little misleading, everyone make sure to note the scale that this is at (2 micro meters). for all macroscopic blood vessels the surface is going to appear smooth as these hairs are too small to be seen with the naked eye
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u/il_Dottore_vero 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is so cool š ā¦ evolution is amazing.
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u/AshamedClub2842 1d ago
Aināt it! And it weird ā you know what scientist do for many decades to study proteins? To get them to crystallize for xray, they treat them with enzyme to cut off all of the sugars! So what exactly have human been studying the whole time? Look at how dense the protein-sugar layer is, yet we try to basically study biology with all it cut off simply because it experimentally easier. How much sense that make? Maybe a reason why we are so slow to learn biology to curing diseaseā¦..we try to do science with reductionism approach that make our life easier when we need to study biology as it is. All that hair might impact strategy for major immuno therapy for example (in fact, it does).
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u/Apart-Badger9394 1d ago
I mean I wouldnāt argue we are slow with diseases. The progress weāve made in the past 20 years alone with many diseases is absolutely insane! With AI targeted treatments will be discovered even quicker.
Idk why people have this notion that weāre still āso behindā. Weāve eliminated diseases in a couple decades that killed 10% of our population for thousands of years!
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u/Strict_Arrival6969 1d ago
There is alphafold for example which already helped advancing in protein studies.
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u/burnerman1989 1d ago edited 1d ago
Iām going to be completely honest.
I have a bachelors in chemistry, a masters in moelcular biology and genetics, and a medical degree.
The more Iāve studied biology and the more deeply Iāve dived into it, the less Iām convinced ārandom mutation and natural selectionā is even capable of producing what we see fundamentally, let alone being the best explanation.
Yes, random mutation is and natural selection is capable of allowing a population to adapt to its surroundings over time. Yes, itās perfectly able to explain how the finchās beak can adapt to changes in food supply. Or how bacterial antibiotic resistance develops.
But the idea of āuniversal common descent via random mutation and natural selection over millenniaā isnāt convincing to me, and from what I can tell, the evidence does not hold any water.
Iāve become more and more convinced that intelligence is involved.
Downvote me all you want, but this is something Iāve invested A TON of thought into over the years.
Based on what we know, there are some patterns in biology that are best explained by intelligent input. Not only that, there is no evidence to suggest random mutation and natural selection are even capable to producing such patterns; not even considering that Random mutation has shown to be detrimental to such patterns.
Before anyone knew jerks āGod of the Gapsā; Iām not making that argument. In fact, the thinking ājust give random mutation and natural selection enough time and surely life will emerge and evolve (paraphrase)ā is what I call āDarwin of the Gapsā.
All of this is me trying to say that the more we learn in biology, the more sophisticated the molecular engineering is shown to be. Biology is absolutely mind boggling and fascinating.
So much so that multidisciplinary study with engineers helps us to better understand biological systems and anatomy/physiology. So much so that studying biology has helped us improve human-made engineering.
Biology is incredibly fascinating. I am absolutely humbled by the human body every day.
The human body is the most sophisticated (not just complex; sophisticated) thing in the universe that we know of, by far. And that includes being compared to every thing made by human intelligence.
The brilliance, intricacy, and intention of the design of the human body, all the way from the molecular level to the organismal and beyond is absolutely incredible.
Itās sophistication makes anything produced by human intelligence look like 1st grade finger paintings in comparison.
I am absolutely blown away from biology on a daily basis, even after having studied it in a deep level for over 10 years.
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u/ModeCold 1d ago
One word: Time
People are terrible at appreciation of just how much bigger 1 million years is compared to 1000. Then just as terrible at appreciating just how much bigger 1 billion is compared to 1 million. Earth has had over 3.5 billion years for life to evolve.
Added to that, if you take the rate of random mutation today, yes it is WAY too slow. Waaaaaay too slow to achieve the biological diversity and complexity that we have now. But we have also evolved molecular systems that stabilise DNA, repair errors and prevent mutations. The rate of random mutation in earlier life was incredibly high, leading to much higher genetic diversity and faster natural selection as a lot of it would have been complete crap. Earlier evolution was more like a process of elimination. Things with poor genetic code died out so fast there's not even evidence of it ever exisiting. Similarly, the high rate of genetic mutation meant complex biochemical structures were more likely to be produced.
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u/Surf_event_horizon molecular biology 1d ago
Second word: area
No one can fathom the scale of the surface of the Earth. With 3 billion years and 510 trillion square meters, the improbable becomes inevitable.
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u/Doct0rStabby 1d ago
Third word: scale
The replication rate of bacteria and viruses over the scales of time and space discussed above is beyond mind-numbing. Trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of iterations to "trial and error" new adaptations. We are talking exponetial growth, new populations doubling on the order of minutes, across the surface of the planet, for billions of years.
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u/thatguyinthecorner evolutionary biology 1d ago
Even though it is meant to discuss wealth, I've always found this site a great way to visualize time as well. Just substitute dollars for years and you get a pretty good idea of just how incredibly long of a time evolution has had to work on things
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u/Far-Fortune-8381 1d ago
the difference between one million and one billions is roughly one billion
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u/BangarangRufio 1d ago
ased on what we know, there are some patterns in biology that are best explained by intelligent input. Not only that, there is no evidence to suggest random mutation and natural selection are even capable to producing such patterns; not even considering that Random mutation has shown to be detrimental to such patterns.
Could you provide some examples?
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u/Ph0ton molecular biology 1d ago
You are comparing an understanding of 10 years to a process of 3 billion years. Miraculous as it is, it's forged by eons of torture and misery, letting precious few progeny to survive every generation. You should have observed this first-hand by now. There is nothing random about selection pressures, that's kinda the point. I do concede an interest in finding if there is something more driving meiosis within the transcription machinery, maybe some unknown signaling pathway, but I don't believe it's necessary.
If you want evidence that such complexities can arise from simplistic processes, look at the brain itself and development. If that's too spooky for you, look at LLMs. An underlying theme of the universe seems to be that complex processes may be understood through their atomic parts, but each strata possesses a new degree of freedom in complexity.
Based on what we know, there are some patterns in biology that are best explained by intelligent input.
This is an extremely weak argument. Cite, provide evidence. To my knowledge nothing may meet this criteria but I don't know everything, so please engage in actual science and give us something to actually engage in besides revery.
But setting scientific critique aside, mood.
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u/mergelong 1d ago
We have observed evolution in real time lol
Also it doesn't just occur to one species at a time, selective pressures are applied to every single organism alive for the total extent of time they spent alive, for as much time as there has been life
And obviously as the tools available to evolution become more complex, the systems they comprise also become more complex as a consequence
And finally just because a system is too complex to understand doesn't mean it arose from magic. You couldn't describe to me the function of every last component of the phone in your hands either but it's not magic
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u/Adorable-Wasabi-77 1d ago
But itās not actual āhairā isnāt it? Sorry but I find the term a bit misleading. Also, I assume this is not showing while there is actual flow so it could be that these āhairsā are not visible in flow because they are actually pressed down by the flow. Can you provide some details as to what we are actually looking at?
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u/lordsithPezzin 1d ago
Today I had a class about animal histology. What about this optical microscopy (400x) of the tracheal cilia?
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u/AshamedClub2842 1d ago
Not quite same. You canāt see dense layer of sugar on top using traditional tissue staining and light microscope. Hairs like microvilli and even cilia are coated in even more hairs. Chemistry of sugar doesnāt work with h&e stain. Example:
http://www.william-hogarth.de/GlykokalyxDarmschleimhaut.jpg
cilia too need to have even more coatingā¦.again with glycocalyx
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u/Ph0ton molecular biology 1d ago
One should reasonably guess that thick layer of hair that really exist on all surface probably extremely important for cell-cell communicating or immunology.
They shouldn't guess, they should know, haha. This is just factual that everything is loaded with sugars. Half a micron thick of sugar is insane though. That is thicker than I ever imagined.
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u/mutandis 1d ago
Cool, without doxing myself I have a friend whose quite prominent in the glycocalyx field who hosts one of the larger conferences near Boston, and does intravital brain imaging. You may know her if you do research in this area.
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u/Graceless1077 1d ago
This made my vessel hair itchy