Lucien Greaves
fossilesque
joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00573-2?rss=yes
Social insects offer powerful models to investigate mechanisms of elaborate individual behaviors comprising a cooperative community. Workers of the leafcutter ant genus Atta are extreme examples of behavioral segregation among phenotypically distinct worker types. We utilize this worker system to test the molecular underpinnings of behavioral programming and the extent of plasticity to reprogramming. We identify specific neuropeptides mediating worker division of labor in A. cephalotes, finding two neuropeptides associated with characteristic behaviors of leaf cutting and of brood care. Genetic knockdown or injection of these neuropeptides led to a stark gain or loss of each behavior and to transcriptomic shifts toward gene pathways expressed in the natural castes. We also reveal global similarities between worker transcriptomes of the eusocial mammal, the naked mole-rat H. glaber, with orthologous A. cephalotes workers. This work underscores the essential function of neuropeptides in establishing complex social behavior and a remarkable plasticity among individual behavioral types.
SETTLER COLONIALISM
yes
Call it what it is: Settler Colonialism
It's a cell biology joke about the ubiquitin system.
https://www.nature.com/articles/458421a
Others can correct me if I'm wrong (pls do this isnt my area), but in normal cell biology, you usually tag the misfolded or regulated proteins for destruction. Here, the meme brags that they’ve been tagging properly folded proteins instead.
From the link:
The destruction of proteins is as important as their synthesis for the maintenance of protein homeostasis in cells. In eukaryotes, the ubiquitin–proteasome system is responsible for most of this protein degradation: the small protein ubiquitin acts as a death warrant, tagging and targeting other proteins to the large proteolytic chamber of the proteasome.
The discovery in the 1970s that certain proteins are ubiquitylated before degradation was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is now known that ubiquitin-mediated destruction plays a crucial part in cell-cycle regulation, DNA repair, cell growth and immune function, as well as in hormone-mediated signalling in plants. More recently, ubiquitin has been shown to have numerous non-proteolytic functions, including involvement in vesicular trafficking pathways, regulation of histone modification and viral budding.
Given the central role of the ubiquitin system in diverse cellular processes, it is not surprising that its dysfunction contributes to cancer and to neurodegenerative and immunological disorders. An understanding of the ubiquitin system is therefore important in devising treatments for such diseases.
Disaster capitalism, bby.
Donate to mutual aid networks. They will need them in the days ahead as the services stop.
They destroy the past to sell you a future. It's coercion and extortionate.
Pedabytes, but you can help in other ways. Donating, uploading and the Archive Warrior. There may be waits to support via torrents too but I do not know.
He was 88.