This will certainly make supermarket interactions much more interesting.

I’ve had this nagging feeling over the past decade, what I’ve been calling to myself “The Great Unwinding” (of our society), capturing this feeling that everything is drifting off into disparate threads. I feel this is getting not only worse, but is accelerating.

Very fun stuff - I have a dumb/cool idea what to try with this @krishnanyamuna.bsky.social , I will send you an email because I am ancient!

This doesn’t address my initial question, but I read this review a few years back, which was pretty interesting doi.org/10.1089/dna....

Here’s the experiment to do: throw a proper ribose polymer in with some cell lysate, and see if the metabolism pathways end up scavenging the ribose. For information carrying molecules, you want them to be stable enough to send the messages they need.

This is probably for an early life researcher or astrobiologist, but what are the preconditions for disaccharides? Did life have to wait for enzymes, or are they likely enough to form with a few catalysts lying around?

Includes Xylose, Galactose and maybe Mannose? So what is the hypothesis for why animals don’t use Ribose for anything else than RNA/DNA and matriglycan? It’s abundant, easy enough to make it seems, so why reserved for those molecules?

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wonder which papers have people been using to prop up the O-GlcNAc idea with Tau? I would be interested to see the data that gave the initial indications that caused people to move in this direction.

Looks like it is back up again! Thanks to wherever/whoever fixed this up!

The submission pages for the positions are closed now, sorry if you missed out on applying!

Also, in light of this, it’s probably important that the data from the Porat preprint on O-linked glycoRNA shows that Core1 O-glycans are required for the glycoRNA signal (rather than direct linkage). I could absolutely buy that losing Core1 screws with endosomal system.

Do we have a cellular system that tidies up/noms away at negatively charged polysaccharides (or polysaccharide-like RNA)?

I had a hunch about a bunch of RNA binding proteins that could pick up sugars, but absolutely did not expect all those proteins that were detected. CD44, the LAMPs, ITGB1, LRP1, CALX/CALR? Points to some pretty interesting trafficking going on with RNA around endosome/lysosome.

Peter Panum was a Dane working in Germany, and the amazing brutalist building we were based in (and are now next to) is named after him.

Questionably fun fact: The study of endotoxin in modern age was kicked off by Peter Panum (studying putrid fluids). He had also done work on albumen, releasing “something” with dilute acid hydrolysis. Eichwald in 1865 did that same reaction on mucin, arguably starting the study of glycoproteins.