How bad off would you be if you had just one genome?
An alien sends you through a transport device— on arrival every fungus, bacteria, mite, virus and plant has been eliminated from your body. You are now at the alien spaceport which is sterile, you can NOT acquire earth faunetta and floretta here. How sick would you be? Are you gonna die from this?
You may have read that bacteria cells vastly outnumber the animal cells in your body. Bacteria are tiny: that is how this numeric disparity is possible the animal cells in our bodies are rather huge— so the mass loss won’t be as dramatic as you might think.
Digestion seems like it would get wrecked. And who knows what happens to our skin
There are several species of carpenter ants that cannot survive without particular gut bacteria— how common is this for animals? Is every one of us a lichen?
@futurebird
Yes, we are all symbiotes. In 10% Human, author Alanna Collen discusses all the various types of microbes we co-exist with and where they reside. Fascinating stuff. Rather than a single microbiome, we have many, some very specific (like our navels) with unique bacteria populations.
@futurebird One example: radiotherapy for cancer can kill off gut flora—which leads to diarrhoea as many things aren't getting digested. The usual advice back in the day was to eat live dairy products like yoghurt.
@futurebird We're still discovering the full range of what's happening int he gut biome, but I suspect it's very similar to garden soil. Our bodies can produce some of the enzymes and acids necessary to break down foods, but it;s clear the flora we carry in our guts contributes significantly - perhaps even to the point where they do the majority of the work. It makes sense - complex molecules like starches and proteins are more easily broken down by microflora into gut digestible molecules.
@futurebird
it is generally thought that most or all large herbivores require their gut biota to eat their usual diet. Without said biota, they might survive on a carefully designed diet that didn't have any of the things they rely on their gut biota to break down, but for how long, and at what cost?
(by the way - this whole issue is one of the reasons re-creating extinct animals from ancient DNA is much, much harder than "well we've got mammoth DNA!" )
@futurebird This reminds me of some of Asimov's stories. Particularly the Caves of Steel series which explores the earliest times of SOME humans going out into other worlds. The ones that left adapted to being completely sterilized of bacteria/etc living in worlds with no chance of infection and became ultra-paranoid about any contact with normal humans. They lived insanely long lives, but had to do so in isolation.
Though the humans stuck on Earth didn't fare a lot better.
@futurebird Hopefully the alien keeper is aware of the need for our bodies to use bacteria to assist us in digestion. So if they refuse to provide me with a gut microbiome, they won't expect me to eat things that require it.
I'm assuming this is a lab-style facility rather than a zoo. In which case, I probably have more pressing concerns than how fully my next meal is going to fully digest.
I haven’t double-checked this, but if I recall correctly, after a while you would probably die of unchecked bleeding due to hemophilia (unless you can get vitamin K supplements on an alien planet.)
Humans require vitamin K to make blood clotting factor, and we can’t make it ourselves. It comes from some of our gut bacteria.
@futurebird
hm, since it's still extremely rare to to do genome sequencing from multiple different regions of people, we still don't know how common or rare chimeras, or people with cells that have different nuclear and/or mitochondrial DNA are, I'm wondering what happens to such a person who goes through this terribly flawed transport. Probably death, I suppose.
Well, there goes serotonin, since 95% of it is made by gut bacteria. It's our most basic hormone as mammals and regulates or co-regulates sleep, immune/autoimmune, mood, sensory, pain, thirst, appetite, wound healing, libido, bone maintenance, and probably a dozen more things I'm forgetting.
@futurebird@semitones
Heart doesn't need the brain to keep beating, but it does need the mitochondria. I'd be very surprised if it lasted a minute. The brain, too.
@stevegis_ssg There are real-life genetic disorders, mitochondrial wasting diseases, that amount to the mtDNA being sufficiently broken that mitochondria can't be replenished after birth. They take a couple of years to kill.
Awful diseases, but they're also exciting in the sense that some of these disorders can be permanently cured with a single-dose genomic medicine. We can't replace the broken mitochondria themselves yet, but their brokenness is often in them not being able to make a small number of very specific proteins; if genes for making these proteins were transplanted into nuclear DNA of a suitably chosen tissue, then, depending on the specific conditions, the availability of such a protein might be able to bypass the mitochondrial brokenness, and allow mitochondria to reproduce properly again.
These wonderful and life-saving medicines are usually priced in millions of dollars per dose, though, because capitalism. And in some cases, the dose must be administered very soon after birth, lest the slow mitochondrial depletion cause, say, irrepairable brain damage.
@stevegis_ssg Of course, if the alien's transporter is too clever for its passengers' good, it might undo such a therapy on the premise that the patched-up cells are "foreign".
@stevegis_ssg There are some organisms with ridiculously large genomes, so a premise for a SciFi story: these plants had to go through such an alien's Interstellar Seeding Teleporter in the distant past, and their DNA got packed together with their microbiome's many DNAs, just to make the trip.
You'd get tired. They type of tired where you are just done - not exhaustion, but that combo where you just mentally and physically can't do anything. Like when you are sick and push too hard.
My LC basically turned off thee ability for my body to process sugar. If I struck to no carbs and what in ketosis, I had energy. But as soon as I snuck a cookie or two, I was bed or couch ridden for a bit. Until I got into ketosis. They boom energy again because my body would use fat, not sugar, for energy.
You'd basically feel you had the flu but without the fever and aches. Need to sit down then poof, energy gone and done.
@futurebird I read a series of sci-fi stories (sorry don't remember the title nor the author...) where the solar system was colonized with thousands of habitable stations/bases. Each one of them had very delicate bacteria (and bioenhanced insects btw) to balance their inner ecosystem and every traveller had to gettheir own sterilised and replaced but the local fauna upon arrival. It was exhausting and disgusting for few days before getting accustomed to the new environment ;-)
@futurebird I remember an episode from In Our Time where somebody said the actual human cells in your body would all fit in one leg (!) – so instant death is my suspicion. But now I need to try and corroborate that claim.
@futurebird Hm. Not likely, I fear. “The number of bacterial cells in the human body is estimated to be around 38 trillion, while the estimate for human cells is around 30 trillion. The number of bacterial genes is estimated to be 2 million, 100 times the number of approximately 20,000 human genes.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome#Relative_numbers
@futurebird That new estimate was later published, apparently.
“Our analysis updates the widely-cited 10:1 ratio, showing that the number of bacteria in our bodies is actually of the same order as the number of human cells. Indeed, the numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favor human cells over bacteria.” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/036103v1
Your body would not be able to digest food, and as soon as you left the sterlile environment you would be signing your death warrant. I takes time—serious ti e—for the body to build up effective internal defences and effective, 𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘥 faunetta and floretta.
@futurebird Does the process remove retroviruses from your genome? Does it remove pieces of retroviruses that have been co-opted for other functions in your genome?