The other day I wrote about how a new life form had been discovered as scientists witnessed evolution in real time, observing the same biological breakthrough that previously gave us plants and mitochondria. And now it seems as though there are other new life forms out there as well. Even ones lurking inside us.
Vice explains:
“Scientists have discovered strange entities hiding in our guts and mouths that may represent an entirely new class of life—if they are even alive.
Dubbed ‘obelisks,’ these tiny rings of RNA can fold into a structure that looks more like a rod, hence the name. They’re also surprisingly commonplace in our microbiomes—the community of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and their genes that live in our bodies. Yet, they’ve gone undetected until now and represent the latest discovery in an ever-growing list of mysterious ‘genetic agents’ hiding in plain sight. Indeed, the researchers who discovered them report that their function, if they have one, is a mystery.
The obelisks were discovered by a team lead by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and pathologist, Andrew Fire, who shared their findings in a preprint.
Using a genome-hunting filter they developed, researchers found just shy of 30,000 obelisks by scouring the Integrative Human Microbiome Project database, a dataset of microbiomes used by researchers worldwide to study human health and disease. When they searched other microbiome datasets from all over the world, they uncovered even more. In one dataset, 6.6 percent of gut samples and a whopping 53 percent of mouth samples contained obelisks.
‘The prevalence and apparent novelty of these elements implies more is yet to be learned about their interplay with microbial and human life,’ the authors write. Fire has previously declined to be interviewed, given that the finding still needs to be scrutinized by the scientific community in peer review.
Obelisks represent their own class of organism (if you can even call them that—the paper refers to them as “biological entities”). They lie somewhere between viruses and viroids—single-stranded, circular RNA that were thought to mostly infect plants, including wreaking havoc on weed crops.
Although they look pretty similar, viroids can’t make proteins of their own, whereas researchers discovered that obelisks can. These obelisk-made proteins aren’t like any proteins we know about today, which is why Fire’s team named them ‘oblins.’ Exactly what these oblins do for obelisks is just one of a plethora of questions researchers now have.”
It’s weird to think that we have a life form living inside us but that was already the case with the microbiome in our mouths and guts. We live in a symbiotic relationship with other organisms as does every other living thing. Kind of makes you philosophically question what it means to be you when “you” is actually a conglomeration of more than one thing. And now we can add obelisks into that mix as well.
Another new life form has been discovered.
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