These days new life forms are like buses. Nothing happens for a long time. Then several come along at once. Plasmids, Viroids, Phages, Rickettsiae, prions…..now another discovery has been added to this strange quasi- bestiary of entities of varying complexity that seem to straddle the border lines between what is alive and what is not. These new ones are called Obelisks, and they have only been found (so far!) in types of bacteria that live in the human digestive system.
We have two links for you today, For a quick scan you won’t beat this one [1] from Ellyn Lapointe of the Mail. If you want a bit more detail. here’s Elizabeth Pennisi for Science[2] Anyway, they agree on the details. Obelisks are tiny bits of RNA, just enough to encode one or two genes, that seem to arrange themselves into tiny rod-like forms. Where they come from and why they persist are still unknown. But for us, whom readers will recall started our digital lives as an antibiotics blog, they offer one advantage. They exist as colonists in bacterial cells. Anything like that, made of nucleic acid, can in theory be tweaked. One more potential tool then to try to vitiate the effects of antibiotic resistant microbes.
[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14207419/scientists-new-lifeform-hiding-inside-human-bodies.html
[2]https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-insane-new-viruslike-entities-found-human-gut-microbes
#antibiotic resistance #microoganisms #microbiology #obelisks #biology #medicine #health
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