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Borgs are giant genetic elements with potential to expand metabolic capacity

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    Science

    Plants Appear to Be Breaking Biochemistry Rules by Making ‘Secret Decisions’

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    Researchers have just discovered a previously unknown process that makes sense of the ‘secret decisions’ plants make when releasing carbon back into the atmosphere.

    “We found that plants control their respiration in a way we did not expect, they control how much of the carbon from photosynthesis they keep to build biomass by using a metabolic channel,” University of Western Australia plant biochemist Harvey Millar told ScienceAlert.

     

    “This happens right as the step before they decide to burn a compound called pyruvate to make and release CO2 back to the atmosphere.”

    If you think back to high-school biology, you might remember that during photosynthesis, plants make sugar or sucrose. The plant typically makes an excess of sucrose; some is stored, some is degraded. This is called the citric acid (or tricarboxylic acid) cycle, and it’s equally important for life.

    As part of this cycle, sucrose, which has twelve carbon atoms, is broken down into glucose with six carbons. Then glucose is broken into pyruvate, which has three carbons. Using pyruvate for energy produces carbon as a waste product, so it’s at this point where the ‘decision’ is made in the plant.

    “Pyruvate is the last point for a decision,” Millar told ScienceAlert.

    “You can burn it and release CO2, or you can use it to build phospholipids, stored plant oils, amino acids and other things you need to make biomass.”

    The discovery came about while working on a classic plant model organism called thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana). The researchers, led by University of Western Australia plant molecular scientist Xuyen Le, labeled pyruvate with C13 (a carbon isotope) to track where it was being shifted during the citric acid cycle, and found that pyruvate from different sources was being used differently.

     

    This means the plant can actually track the source of the pyruvate and act accordingly, choosing to either release it, or hold on to it for other purposes.

    “We found that a transporter on mitochondria directs pyruvate to respiration to release CO2, but pyruvate made in other ways is kept by plant cells to build biomass – if the transporter is blocked, plants then use pyruvate from other pathways for respiration,” Le said.

    “Imported pyruvate was the preferred source for citrate production.”

    This ability to make decisions, the team suggests, breaks the normal rules of biochemistry, where typically, every reaction is a competition and the processes don’t control where the product goes.

    “Metabolic channeling breaks these rules by revealing reactions that don’t behave like this, but are set decisions in metabolic processes that are shielded from other reactions,” says Millar.

    “This is not the first metabolic channel to ever be found, but they are relatively rare, and this is the first evidence of one governing this process in respiration.”

    Although plants are wonderful stores of CO2 – forests alone store around 400 gigatonnes of carbon – not every molecule of CO2 that is taken up by plants is then kept. Around half of the carbon dioxide that plants take up is released back into the atmosphere.

     

    Being able to get plants to store a little more carbon dioxide in this process could be a fascinating way to help our climate change woes.

    “As we consider building and breeding plants for the future – we shouldn’t just be thinking about how they can be good food and food for our health, but also if they can be good carbon storers for the health of the atmosphere that we all depend on,” Millar told ScienceAlert.

    Such futureproofing is yet to come, as the researchers have only just discovered this biochemical process to behind with. But if we can hijack the way plants make decisions about carbon storage, it could be one piece of the bigger climate change mitigation puzzle.

    The research has been published in Nature Plants.

     

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    Health

    What’s Behind The Strange Drop in American Body Temperatures Over The Past 200 Years?

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    The human body is often said to rest at a healthy internal temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

    This average was established two centuries ago in France, and yet in the meantime, it seems our ‘normal’ physiology has changed ever so slightly.

     

    Early last year, researchers in the United States combed Civil War veteran records and national health surveys and found temperatures among men born at the turn of this century were 0.59 degrees Celsius cooler than those men born around two hundred years earlier.

    Women, on the other hand, had seen a 0.32 degrees Celsius decline since the 1890s. 

    At the time, the authors suggested it might have something to do with inflammation due to disease, which is closely tied to body temperature. With the rise of modern medicine, we’ve seen a decline in chronic infections, and maybe, the authors suggested, this has chilled us out, so to speak.

    Later in 2020, another group of researchers found an eerily similar reduction in body temperature among a relatively remote indigenous tribe in Bolivia, where infections have remained widespread and medical care minimal, despite some modern changes.

    The reasons for the recent decline in body temperature clearly had to go beyond improved hygiene, cleaner water, or improved medical care, and some researchers at Harvard are now investigating another explanation: a decline in physical activity.

     

    When a person exercises regularly, it often coincides with an increase in their metabolism. This, in turn, can raise their body’s resting temperature for hours or even up to a day, which means falling body temperature measurements might indicate falling physical activity. 

    Unfortunately, the methods we have for measuring physical activity today weren’t around 200 years ago, so we can’t really compare how we move now to how we moved then.

    What could be possible, however, is to use historical body temperature data as a “thermometer” to gauge physical activity before we started keeping track of these things.

    If we can model the relationships between physical activity, metabolism, and body temperature we could theoretically work backward.

    The idea started as a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation among Harvard researchers, and while their “first pass estimate” is a good start, it’s still based on a bunch of assumptions. That said, it is an intriguing hypothesis.

    The model the researchers ultimately created found every 1°C increase in historical body temperature is linked to an approximate 10 percent change in resting metabolic rate.

     

    Given how much male body temperatures seem to have decreased since the 1820s, their metabolic rate must have therefore declined by 6 percent in the same time.

    That’s equivalent to about half an hour of physical activity a day, according to the authors’ calculations. More precisely, a 27-minute fast walk or slow run for a 75-kilogram (165-pound) male.

    “This is a first pass estimate of taking physiological data and trying to quantify declines in activity,” explains skeletal biologist Andrew Yegian from Harvard University.

    “The next step would be to try to apply this as a tool to other populations.”

    Because these initial estimates use body temperature as a proxy for metabolic activity and then metabolic activity as a proxy for physical activity, it’s very unlikely that these results are not truly representative of the reality.

    The rate at which a population metabolizes calories can be pinned down to more than just physical activity, although it is undoubtedly true the average American today exercises less than they did 50 years ago, thanks to automobiles, televisions, and the dawn of the desk job.

    It’s just less clear what that’s doing to our metabolisms and the temperature of our bodies. And it might not be the same for men and women.

    “Fat also acts as an insulator, affecting heat dissipation from the body, while also increasing the cost of PA, and our estimation methods did not correct for changes in fat mass over time,” the authors write.

    A reduced need to thermoregulate in modern environments could also be impacting our metabolic rates, as could improved health and nutrition.

    The authors admit their calculations need further refinement, but they hope their approximation will serve “as an anchor for understanding how the decline in physical activity affected health and morbidity during the industrial era.” 

    The study was published in Current Biology. 

     

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