Tag: protein

Animals Do Have Personalities

Chimpanzees apparently do have personalities, according to a new study. Although, what first struck me was: “How does one define a personality?” I’ve always viewed it as something quite subjective. When I consider someone to be the type of person who lacks a personality, I tend to have people who disagree with me. They’re wrong, of course, but they still disagree with me.

Anyway, the research team at the University Of Edinburgh apparently found that Chimpanzees do have personalities. What is an animal personality, though? Well an animal personality is defined as the differences between different animals. To make it a little clearer, if there’s a fish and he can see some bait in the water. A fish with personality A may think to himself that he doesn’t want to take the risk and isn’t interested anymore. A fish with personality B may decide he will take the risk to get the juicy piece of bait on the end of the hook. And this can be applied to a variety of different scenarios.

The study also specified that chimpanzees and animals like Orang-utans, which are sometimes referred to as ‘People of the Jungle’, need and require friends just like most humans. But surely we knew this in the beginning due to the herd mentality of many species of ape? If you watch any nature show then you will see it. In fact, some species of ape will even get their protein from killing and cannibalising other apes.

What does all this mean, though?

In short, it will have very little impact on our scientific advancement, nor will it influence tomorrow or anything like that. What it will show, with a little more research, is that we did evolve from a common ancestor; the common ancestor being the ancestor chimpanzees evolved from too. And this will have a profound impact on a variety of religious sects as they still don’t believe that evolution even exists.

Evolution

Furthermore, a question I’ve always wondered about, is who exactly is this common ancestor? If we can gradually trace ourselves back then it will yield the various incarnations of ourselves all the way throughout history. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it is a point of interest at least.

On a side note, the only thing we have to be surprised about is why didn’t we know all this before? Why do humans still find it hard to grasp that we are just really intelligent apes? Why do so many humans still think we came from somewhere special, as if we are not like anything else on our planet? If we did then surely we could have predicted this to start with. Surely we are just slightly more intelligent monkeys?

Ape Man

Iron-Spiked Bacteriophages

It’s been known by scientists and university students alike that a type of virus called a bacteriophage attacks bacteria by drilling through the outer membrane of the bacterium. The virus then runs wild and multiplies until the unfortunate little bacterium explodes in a spectacular cellular fireworks display. But what scientists have never been able to discover is just how they get inside bacteria to begin with – until now.

Bacteriophage

Petr Leiman, a biophysicist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who led the team of scientists, and who will publish his findings in Structure said that they had already anticipated that a special kind of protein was making the initial opening. However, the problem was that they couldn’t see the end of the tip to determine what it was.

The team of scientists, at their Swiss base, decided to reverse engineer the tips to try and find out what they were made of. Their test subjects were the bacteriophages P2 and Φ92; for those people who don’t know the book off by heart, they typically attack the e-coli bacteria and the bacteria which cause salmonella. The P2 gene for its bacterium puncturing capabilities was already well-known to scientists, and after some searching the gene for Φ92 was also found.

The proteins in these genes were then grown and isolated, before been turned into crystals. This allowed scientists to use the x-ray crystallography technique to bombard the crystals with x-rays in order to bring up an image of the structure. This went well, but one problem still remained. The end of the structure, the part they were looking for, didn’t show up.

Undeterred, though, the genes were reengineered to only produce the invisible part of the structure. After carrying this out, it was then found that the end of the spike was a single iron atom connected by six amino acids.

Originally, it was thought that bacteriophages had help from elsewhere to puncture the outer membranes of the bacterium, but clearly they don’t need any help at all as they have a super-mini iron spike instead.

But what’s the point of all this? Well, the answer to this is that if scientists can use the viruses to find weaknesses in bacteria then it could lead to a number of new ultra-powerful medicines. However, let’s be honest, even if the scientists do create the medicines, we won’t see any of these new medicines in Britain anytime soon as this country has a history of withholding a number of these new medicines due to the fact that it would cost more money.