obelisks

February 16, 20243min readRod-shaped fragments of RNA called “obelisks” were discovered in gut and mouth bacteria for the first timeBy Joanna Thompson For the first time, scientists have spotted rogue bits of RNA colonizing the bacteria in our gut. These “obelisks,” as the researchers have dubbed them, may represent a whole new class of infectious agent.“It’s just super thrilling,” says Kathleen Hefferon, a microbiologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the research. The study is available on the preprint…

Biological entities called obelisks have been hiding – in large numbers – inside the human mouth and gut. These microscopic entities, which were recently discovered by a team at Stanford University, are circular bits of genetic material that contain one or two genes and self-organise into a rod-like shape.Although the study is still in preprint form, meaning that it has not been peer-reviewed, it has already been extensively written about, including in two heavyweight journals: Nature and Science.Let's delve deeper into…

Our mouths and guts are teeming with mysterious somethings that are unknown to science, new research suggests. A team says they’ve discovered distinct virus-like structures hanging out among the bacteria that live in our bodies. The researchers have coined these structures “obelisks,” and they might further redefine what it means to be a living thing.Alex Winter on the Most Important Modern Horror Movie Viruses are small packages of genetic material made of either DNA or RNA enclosed inside a protective protein shell.…

We may have an adequate understanding of the human body in that, well, we invented aspirin and sequenced the genome, but researchers still find out new things about the humble homo sapien all of the time. Case in point? Scientists hanging out in the human gut and mouth. The researchers are calling these virus-like structures “obelisks”, due to their presumed microscopic shape.These entities replicate like viruses, but are much smaller and simpler. Due to the minuscule size, they fall into the “viroid” class, which are…