Thursday, December 08, 2022

I'm back

Hi all. Well, I'm back.

Over the years I've taken a few breaks from blogging. Eventually something takes my fancy and I restart. There is usually a stack of way too many backlogged comments to reply to and I just go through deleting the frank spam and approving all of the rest.

Which is highly unsatisfactory but is just how it goes. My apologies.

I hit a total brick wall on the roll of medium chain triglycerides in insulin signalling vs resistance. I've not resolved this and still have coconut oil and butter as subjects for long term consideration. Hence the couple of posts over the last few days.

I'm also interested in the absolute primacy of ROS as the underlying signalling system in and between all cells, prokaryotes included. They underly insulin signalling the way machine code (is that still a thing nowadays?) underly Cobol or Fortran.

And if LUCA was, of necessity, anaerobic, where did she get her oxygen from to use to make ROS as signalling molecules?

I have a post part written starting on this front and will tidy it up and post as I get the chance.

Am I well?

I'm still bouldering once a week, just about at V4a on good day. Had a go at roped climbing earlier this week. Enjoying the start of winter here although last summer was marvellous in the UK. Looking forward to the Solstice in just over a week. Run at MAFF heart rate occasionally but not nearly as much as I'd like too.

Still unvaccinated and no idea if I've had the 'vid since I failed to contract it from my wife back in Feb/March 2020. Had a proper cold two weeks ago but it never crossed my mind to do any sort of test. It was a cold, with a good sore throat. Kids are back at school etc so... Shrug. For odd practical reasons the day of its initiation was associated with a one day break from carnivore at a posh do in London. I blame the vegetables!

Life is good.

Peter

10 comments:

lapis_exilis said...

Hey Peter!
Glad you're back - and V4 is really good. Bouldering scales are logarithmic, hehe!
(Also a high five from another vaccine avoidant, beef-eating, "THE-science" denying redneck from the forests of West Virginia!)
Cheers!

-shade

Gian said...

Great to know you are back and well. Regarding covid all kinds of unconfirmed reports and rumors. Does Edinburgh really having 57000 covid cases per day?

mct4health said...

What do you think about this?
Peroxisomal beta-oxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: isocitrate dehydrogenase provides NADPH for reduction of double bonds at even positions
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9450993/

It could mean that PUFAs with unsaturated bond on even position can by-pass ROS regulation of TCA cycle (aconitase) so disregulate cell fuel intake (lower citrate level).

Jay said...

Hi Peter, glad to see you back. To answer your question: machine code is still a thing, Cobol and Fortran not so much (it's all Java, Python, C++ and many, many others these days....)
As an unvaxxed (well) over-50 long-term HFLC/carnivore adjacent, pufa avoider I finally got 'the bug' back in August. Wasn't the worst thing I've ever had, but not the most trivial either. Caught it from a vaccinated and boosted person, nuff said.

Peter said...

Hi lapis, I never expected to go any distance in bouldering but now it’s finger board training for progressively smaller crimps… Found the roped climbing somewhat cluttered when I tried it but it let the route setters place crux moves at twice the hight of the bouldering wall. But then you’re not going to use freewill to get down after a fail….

Gian, I don’t even know how many people live in Edinburgh! It amazes me that anyone is still testing, except I learned from a colleague in our practice that a +ve test gets you time off (not checked how much) on full pay rather than statutory sick-pay, that’s our corporate approach. No idea why or what it hopes to achieve. At our end of the practice we have work to do and most of us just get on with it unless actually ill enough (with anything) to genuinely need time off. Huh! At least three out of about 10 of us are unvaxxed.

mct4health, interesting. I’ve read a number of yeast studies but never picked up this essentiality of peroxisomes. I guess that’s why they can cope without mitochondria. Haven’t gone beyond the abstract so not sure what this tells us about mammals…

Jay, during my pre-university year as the world’s worst Cobol programmer I always had the greatest respect for people who could read assembler and machine code. I had no idea what I was doing in Cobol. The look of relief on my supervisor’s face when I handed in my notice to go to vet school was somewhat informative!

Peter

Eric said...

Glad you're back, and I admire your tenacity at trying to uncover the basic workings of cells and clumps of cells of any kind.

Now who's LUCA? I had to go back to a post from 2017 to find any mention, but even there, it was not explained.

Peter said...

Oops, sorry Eric. When you get so steeped in a subject you can actually forget what you've posted about and why should anyone recall posts from five years ago anyway? LUCA is the last universal common ancestor. She's a very, very strange beast. I do have a few comments to make about her and perhaps sideways about ROS so maybe I'll put a post up. Ultimately she's the precursor to both bacteria and archaea but was incomplete. She had RNA, DNA, some core proteins and an energy system based on substrate level phosphorylation but did not have the ability to duplicate DNA or have a gene derived cell wall production system. She cannot have been free living yet she spawned both bacteria and archaea who went on to develop their own (different) cell membrane structures, DNA replication systems and refined their own ATP synthase machines (there does seems to have been a crude prototype present in LUCA).

Peter

altavista said...

https://www.smh.com.au/national/post-christmas-covid-wave-looms-as-some-get-infected-for-a-fifth-time-20221222-p5c86j.html

I hope you got your 16th jab. From Pfizer of course.

Or else we'll have your job :)

Passthecream said...

Talking about covid is now infra dig but it has been interesting for me that after three years of having multiple opportunities to catch it, working in two R-7 schools and also having a daughter at home with it in our small house 6 months ago -- coughed on sneezed at and shared car rides with infectees, I finally caught the latest variant in early december when 7 people in the one school office all seem to have caught it on the same day. Some were multiply vaxxed, some had it before and two like me never had it before. That tells me it is now extremely and unavoidably contagious as per the news coming out of China of an R0 of 20 or more. It wasn't too bad for me, very low energy and sore throat for 3 days and a persistent sniffle and I had an opportunity to measure it over time because we get unlimited free rat tests. I was mildly positive ( thin red line) for ten days - as long as the symptoms lasted. My wife had a worse case, a much higher detectable viral load for the same duration.

The most interesting thing for me is that unlike those frequent reports of long covid, as soon as I cleared the virus I felt fantastic, better than I have done for months and never looking back. Perhaps it knocked out some other persistent infection? No idea really. Just enjoying it.

kellyt said...

Life is good, indeed. Thanks, Peter.
KT