PHAGE WARS

 PHAGE WARS

3.4 billion years of weapon evolution 

As I have brought up before in my previous posts Nature engineers a yin and yang balance to prevent any species from becoming a cancer. The grass eaters would keep foliage in balance and predators would keep grass eaters in balance and so on. Even within us a protein agonist would start a process and another protein antagonist will be there to end it. To maintain equilibrium. If we can stably maintain equilibrium like we see during our youth, we can theoretically live forever. The oldest balancing war has been raging from 3.4 billion years and at a mammoth scale between two of the largest populations on Earth: bacteria and viral bacteriophages or Phages: “There are believed to be 10 million times more phages than stars in the visible universe. They're busy, too. Each day, half of all ocean bacteria are infected and blown apart by these replicating microscopic assassins in a forever war” David McFadden, University of Ottawa.  To give context there are 1 billion bacteria in 1 liter of sea water. This massive amount of dead bacteria feed the planktons which then generate more than half of the oxygen on our planet. Another way to estimate is a trillion phages for every grain of sand on our planet. They have 10s of millions of species of which we have recorded only 1,500 so far. Bacteria can multiply rapidly and even though they are invisible to human eye they can crowd out every other species were it not for the Phages that constantly destroy them. It’s ridiculously unbelievable how a tiny invisible bacteria with a few thousand genes can construct super intelligent engineering weapons like CRISPR to rapidly edit genes of their invading enemy to destroy them before they are destroyed. Phages keep building weapons to outsmart bacterial defense and bacteria keeps generating more novel defenses to protect itself. The Phage than evolves to overcome that defense. Check out Chapter 5 below. This has been going on and on for billions of years. This war is even going on in our bodies: for example Phages occupy our mucosal surfaces like in our nostrils and kill infecting bacteria and become part of our immune response. Bacteria have already gifted us CRISPR in vivo gene editing technology, imagine if we can retrain Phages to attack cancers with the same ferocity and specificity they use to attack bacteria. All living things on our planet share common genes and proteins but majority of the Phages genes and proteins are unknown: they are like invisible alien Zombies hunting, biting, infecting and killing bacteria. 

I want my start up to build unique massive gene insertion technologies inspired from the Phage wars. What genes do I want to insert? Each of the species that have survived on Earth have been gifted unique evolutionary adaptations. Dinosaurs became apex predators and dominated over all other species in their time. Humans, the gift of intelligence which allows us to dominate the planet now. But there are other species that have adaptations that are uniquely superior: like Planar worms can restore and older senescent cell back to youthful configuration or Ginkgo Biloba tree can stabilize their genome/epigenome which permanently keeps them in youth. It may take thousands or even millions of years for us to acquire such adaptations. Instead I want to trigger evolutionary jumps by adopting these rare adaptations into humans. Whether I will succeed or not we have to see. In the meanwhile this is my first post in the age of AI so I have used it to share my wonder of the Phage war. It’s full of fascinating gems and nuggets of information packaged in an easy to read manner. Enjoy: