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| DNA - electron scanning microscope image. |
I am hi-jacking this article by Sally Adee, in New Scientist, 6th July 2019, as I think it hints at clues for one of my long held science-beliefs; that all life-forms and ultimately all matter are formed by persistent and coherent patterns of electro-magnetic energy. It is not a new concept that sub-atomic particles manifest both as particles and as radiating wave-forms - dubbed WAVICLES. It is a well proven fundamental feature of our universe that all matter radiates legible radio signals. Science identifies distant clouds of gases, and the bodies lying beyond them, by analyzing and categorizing the elements causing energetic sources of radio waves. e.g. from active stars, and as these radio signals pass through dust clouds, science analyzes the elements in the dust cloud. Such signals might originate hundreds of light years away - yet the information remains coherent and legible to our instruments. The universe is crisscrossed by trillions of wavicles. My thought is that the patterns for all matter are inherent in these wavicles - including for example the templates or blue-prints for DNA. All matter can be deconstructed back to electromagnetic waves. This medical research studies electrons - which are waves.
Can
you kill cancer cells by cutting off their electricity supply? That’s the
implication of a new look at how cells swap electrons. It could herald devices
that assemble inside tumours to switch off their electric current and starve
them to death.
Frankie
Rawson at the University of Nottingham, UK, and his colleagues have detected
subtle changes in the currents emanating from different types of cancer
cells. These changes hint at what metabolic changes have happened in the cells that is characteristic of cancer.
All
biological cells use electrons to power themselves. In the early 2000s,
however, it was discovered that cells can also send electrons outside their
membranes along biological “relays” made of proteins and other molecules. But
we didn’t know the significance of this trans-plasma membrane electron transfer
(tPMET). “I think we’re only just starting to realise the importance,” says
Rawson.
People
have long suspected that there is a link between the way cancer cells change
their metabolism and changes to the way the cells do this trans-plasma
electron transfer.
Normal
cells produce almost all of their energy in their internal “power
stations”. But mitochondria can’t power the aggressive demands of a rapidly
dividing cancer cell, so cancer cells dial down their mitochondria, and ramp up
a metabolic pathway known as glycolysis, which converts sugar into energy.
Reducing
the output from the mitochondria creates a problem, because free electrons
build up inside the cell, clogging up the glycolysis process. To keep from
starving, the cancer cells eject those extra electrons using tPMET.
“tPMET
is like a safety valve,” says Patries Herst at the University of Otago, New
Zealand. Indeed, the more invasive and aggressive a cancer, the more heavily it
relies on glycolysis and then tPMET to get rid of the electrons. There
are several different types of tPMET with different functions, however, which
has made it hard to study how they are involved in tumour growth. “There have
been a lot of good investigations,” says Lars Jeuken at the University of
Leeds, UK, “but no one had ever figured out how to directly measure the
electron current.”
Rawson’s
team suspected that the strength of these electron currents could reveal when a
cell had turned cancerous.
“If
there is a lot of voltage going through a cell’s membrane,” says Herst, “then
that means they are using this system a lot, which could have implications for
the level of aggressiveness and invasiveness of the cancer.”
Rawson
and his colleagues looked at the strength of the electrical current for three
different lung cancer cell lines, and it showed clear differences, allowing
them tell which cancer cells were metastatic, or capable of spreading, and
which were still non-invasive.
As
the team suspected, when they engineered the cells to reduce the number of
tPMET relays, their mitochondria were no longer able to produce enough energy
and became overtaxed. But a surprise was in store: instead of the expected
slowdown in electron transmission, they saw a “marked increase” in current,
Rawson says, as the cells used any remaining tPMETs to fling out as many
electrons as possible.
“This
was a major, major finding for us,” says Rawson. “Because if you can inhibit
that external electron transfer, the cells have limited ways to sustain energy,
so they’ll either be unable to proliferate, or they’ll die.”
It
also raises another possibility: if we could inhibit the electron transfer, we
could starve cancer cells. No drugs are available that can interfere with
tPMET, but the new research suggests that we could do it another way.
Paola
Sanjuan-Alberte, also at the University of Nottingham, and Rawson have been
working on self-assembling nano-electrodes that could interface with cancerous
cells to tweak their electrical signalling. These devices apply an electrical
field to prevent a cell’s relays from shedding the electrons.
However,
Herst and Jeuken both caution that more studies need to be done to gain a
deeper understanding of the role this electron transfer plays in normal
and in healthy cells.
Journal
reference: Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Bioenergetics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbabio.2019.06.012
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