#science asks

[studentbyday]

for the science ask game!! 🔭, 🔬, and 🪐

thanks for the ask @archaic-stranger!

🔭 what sparked your interest in science/your field

i like science's consistency and how topics build on each other to paint a picture-in-progress explaining the intricacies of nature. but i think a major reason for my interest in bioinformatics is how it can be used to accelerate life sciences research (ngl, covid happening was a big reason i chose my degree and why i'm latching onto the whole bioinformatics idea 😅)...

🔬 a science class you loved, and why

molecular biology! it gets a bad rep for being a difficult course at my school, so i wanted to prove to myself that i could excel at it bc it's the basis for a lot of bioinformatics work (and i did! i got the highest mark in the class! 🤓) 😅

🪐 something you learned this week

the CYP 3A4 enzyme in the liver metabolizes 50% of all clinically-used drugs, which can lead to drug interactions bc if you take multiple drugs, they could compete for the enzyme's active site.

the ask game 👩🏻‍🔬

[biochemjess]

Hey Biogirl,

In your professional opinion, didn't that poison act a little fast on Tawan. I mean one sip and he's suddenly in trouble *shakes hands dramatically* Is this really how poison works?????

Longish post, so anyone not interested in poison skip out now.

One caveat, I am not a toxicologist, so not an expert on this. Poison can act extremely fast. Inhaled cyanide will kill you in seconds as will some animal venoms. I think ingested poisons tends to take a little bit longer. They need to get from the stomach into the blood. The other issue with ingested poisons is that you tend not to immediately throw them up, otherwise they'd be out of your system quickly and run a reduced risk of killing you.

However, if I were trying to fake a poisoning in front of a bunch of non-experts, an emetic would be a good option. You'd throw up, look sick, but not actually be in danger. This is assuming you've dosed yourself correctly. If I were Tawan (blech!) that's what I'd do. I'd also knock over that water bottle so they didn't have a clean sample with the "poison".

(Highly technical part here: If I had the "poison" in water, I'd run it on GCMS gas chromatography mass spectrometry, which would give me the precise mass of the compound and make hunting for it MUCH easier.)

The thing that had me rolling my eyes was that the doctor figured out he was poisoned so quickly. A tox panel isn't going to come back that fast, especially if you don't know what you're looking for. When you have drug testing, for example, the assay is looking for a specific signal at a specific location. If it's an unknown drug, this gets trickier (unless you stupidly put it in water and leave the bottle around). Even still, I'd expect several days before the lab results came back.

Pretty much all medical shows have lab turnaround times that are ridiculously fast.

[symbiotic-science]

Hello! I love your blog, but may I ask a question?

Does speciation through hybridisation ever happen in mammals, because most hybrids I currently know of are

A: Sterile/Infertile

B: Very very unlikely.

Thank you!

Hi there! I had to do a little digging on this myself. I KNOW off the top of my head that penguins have had some natural fertile hybrids, though I don't believe to the degree of complete speciation yet, but those are birds not mammals.

There is a species of bat in the Caribbean that have been theorized through DNA analysis to have speciated through hybridization (Larsen, Marchan-Rivadeneira, & Baker, 2010). Artibeus jamaicensis and A. planirostris (both are species of fruit bats) and a third still unknown species are thought to have led to the species A. schwartzi (Larsen, Marchan-Rivadeneira, & Baker, 2010).

The dolphin species Stenella clymene also has shown evidence to have arisen through natural hybridization from the species of S. coerueloalba and S. longisrostris (Amaral et al, 2014).

So albeit rare or under researched, speciation through hybridization DOES happen in mammals! I will say though that you will find hybrids from diploid (2 copies of chromosomes) species less common than in polyploid (more than 2 copies of chromosomes) species, since in polyploid there is more room for mutations and still having enough copies of needed DNA to be functional.

References:

Larsen, P. A., Marchan-Rivadeneira, M. R., & Baker, R. J. (2010). Natural hybridization generates mammalian lineage with species characteristics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(25), 11447–11452. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1000133107

Amaral, A. R., Lovewell, G., Coelho, M. M., Amato, G., & Rosenbaum, H. C. (2014). Hybrid Speciation in a Marine Mammal: The Clymene Dolphin (Stenella clymene). PLoS ONE, 9(1), e83645. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083645

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[aziofgrim]

hey

science time ig? idk ur vibes feel a bit off?

the eiffel tower is up to 15cm taller during the summer time :)

Hii-

Oo you're perceptive- thank you for the science! Oooo really?? How does it do that, if you don't mind me askin?? Like- does the material react to heat, or am I overthinking this-?

[horror-ofthe-sea]

yo

howre you doin

99% of you is empty space :D

Eh, you? And ooooo neat

[kozutenshi]

CRUSH ASKS!

pick a science topic!

atom - what are the small actions that made you fall for him?

brain - do you plan on moving on from him?

caldera - give one time that you weren't in good terms.

dendrite - name something he had done for you(& you only).

electron - what are his negative traits?

focus - when did he catch your attention?

gravity - name something you did together.

hemoglobin - hat color does he remind you of?

isotope - what trait does he have in common with your ex?

synapse - what kept you from confessing to him?

[biochemjess]

what do methanol poisoning and the asian flush have in common??

Aw! Now my mutuals are supporting my science habits. So, yeah, this is the exact same pathway. Bit of random science trivia incoming. You've been warned.

As we know, alcohol will kill you, so your body has a way of detoxing alcohol and (as a perk) turning it into energy. In your liver, the first enzyme leaps into action turning alcohol into acetaldehyde. The problem is that this is more dangerous (toxic) that alcohol. In most people this is rapidly broken down by the next enzyme in the detox cascade so it's not a problem. In some people (usually Asian descent) this second enzyme works poorly and acetaldehyde builds up causing the bright flush among a number of other nasty reactions.

Now while acetaldehyde is not good it gets worse with methanol.

Methanol itself is not really the big problem. The problem is that the enzyme that turns alcohol into acetaldehyde can't tell the difference between alcohol and methanol and attempts the same detox and creates...formaldehyde. If you're thinking, isn't that what the pickle bodies in, yeah... This is acutely toxic. It starts crosslinking all the proteins in your body into an absolutely mess. Then the next enzyme kicks in and turns formaldehyde into formic acid which is also acutely toxic.

The treatment for methanol poisoning is ethanol. The trick is to swamp the enzymes with so much of the right molecule (alcohol) that it can't turn methanol into formaldehyde and eventually methanol is cleared in the kidneys. (Today they use a substitute for ethanol so they don't get you drunk in the process.)

[aziofgrim]

babies have over 100 more bones than adults. most of these are skull plates, which fuse together as the child grows up.

every person's body contains enough dna to go from earth to pluto and back. seventeen times.

10x more bacterial cells than human cells in every human body.

all the ants in the world put together would outweigh every single human.

same with bacteria/viruses and every other organism

Ooooo that’s so cool! Thank you for the facts

Also the fact that I knew some of those is really nice-