Posted on 10/19/2006 6:25:16 AM PDT by Grig
WASHINGTON -- Using grammar rules alongside test tubes, biologists may have found a promising new way to fight nasty bacteria, including drug-resistant microbes and anthrax.
Studying a potent type of bacteria-fighters found in nature, called antimicrobial peptides, biologists found that they seemed to follow rules of order and placement that are similar to simple grammar laws. Using those new grammar-like rules for how these antimicrobial peptides work, scientists created 40 new artificial bacteria-fighters.
Nearly half of those new germ-fighters vanquished a variety of bacteria and two of them beat anthrax, according to a paper in Thursday's journal Nature.
This potentially creates not just a new type of weapon against hard-to-fight germs, but a way to keep churning out new and different microbe-attackers so that when bacteria evolve new defenses against one drug, doctors won't be stymied.
Using grammar as their guide, scientists could easily produce tens of thousands of new bacteria-fighters and test them for use as future drugs, said study lead author Gregory Stephanopoulos, a chemical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It would likely take several years to develop the new drugs, but the process conceivably could be speeded up for fighting the worst bacteria, Stephanopoulos said.
In man's war with microbes, bacteria keep mutating to develop resistance to nature-derived drugs. However, this new method could allow scientists to jump several steps ahead of microbes, said Robert Berwick, a computational linguistics and engineering professor at MIT who wasn't part of the team.
Peptides are small proteins that attack the membrane walls of microbes causing it to rupture, said Georgetown University surgery professor Michael Zasloff, who first discovered antimicrobial peptides 19 years ago.
The key turns out to be in the way the peptides are made, which is by stringing together amino acid molecules, which scientists represent with letters. And that's when researchers saw a pattern that would make an English teacher beam.
"You have a string of letters and that string of letters reminds you immediately of a sentence, a kind of incomprehensible sentence, and you wonder in that sentence, 'Is that meaning hidden?'" asked Stephanopoulos. He used the example of a sentence: "Dave asks a question." What Stephanopoulos did was the equivalent of substitute different names for Dave and found that the peptide often still beat the bacteria.
Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser said that using grammar rules to decode genetics and medicine is growing more popular. But he said he worries that too many people are calling grammar what is really just simple code, not nearly as complicated as human language.
Berwick said the bacteria-fighting grammar rules are equivalent to the extremely basic spelling rule, "i before e except after c." The grammar rules Stephanopoulos developed are about what 2-year-olds learn on their own by listening to adults speak, he said.
A code is a code, even the most rudimentary ones. It takes intelligence to create a code, period.
No, chemistry.
To oversimplify: KOH, NaOH (potassium hydroxide, sodium hydoxide) have similar properties.
"The grammar rules Stephanopoulos developed are about what 2-year-olds learn on their own by listening to adults speak, he said."
Or kind of like it just evolved and required no special tinkering or teaching.
Are you an IDer so intent upon seeing something there that you a). didn't read the story you posted or b.) are completely misinterpreting an analogy to fit your preconceived notions?
Or maybe I am just reading into your brief comment to much.
This seems it would work not.
Since the principal researcher is at MIT, maybe he could enlist MIT's most famous grammarian, Noam Chomsky, in the work -- thereby to attract support from Hugo Chavez!
I agree - it really doesnt have anything to do with grammar. All they are saying is that simple rules can, in most cases, determine which compounds are useful and which are not.
Apparently, spelling suffers in the process...
I are wonder if this work won't...there, my cold's gone!!!
You know if this is the case, this could work on viruses as well, especially aids and hepatitis c.
What ever the arguements about "grammar"...lets get this stuff out of the labs and into the medical hospitals, I see too much nosocomial staph infections that just kill our elderly and weakest folk.
I wonder if the peptide work could be used against cancers as well!
This "code" is much sipler, more on a level with parts of speech:
This seems it would helicopter not.
(replacing verb with noun)
And everyone thought I was just being nitpicky as hell. I'm saving lives here, people! ;)
sipler=simpler
me caffeine needing
It's just organic chemistry. The science of chemistry is simply learning and exploiting the 'grammar rules' of molecules in order to predict their properties, learn how they change and how they react react. Similar chemicals in similar environments will behave in similar ways. It's all nature. All chemistry obeys relatively simple rules.
So the grammar rules are "about what 2-year-olds learn on their own by listening to adults speak". Doesn't that two year old require some intelligence to absorb an understanding of such rules? Don't the adults the two year old is around have to have intelligence to speak normally for those rules to get picked up? Yet here we have some bacteria with no innate intelligence conforming to a set of 'grammatical rules'. Doesn't prove anything either way, but I'd say there is good reason for ID'ers to find this interesting.
The same argument can be applied at the molecular level to self-replicating molecules. The fact that scientists in 50 or 100 years haven't been able to duplicate the emergence of DNA doesn't disprove the possibility that it can occur given the millions of cubic miles of oceans, and billions of years of terrestrial existence. (Time isn't their only "god" as you put it, the vastness of the oceans is equally incomprehisibly gigantic and can also afford the opportunity for extremely unlikely events.)
Let me ask you this: suppose scientists were able to do so: would you abandon your faith?
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