Just Getting Started, A Giant Health Story
7264 New Human Proteins*
A New Category of Proteins, "Micro-proteins," thousands of them.
Call me impressionable, but I think this is a HUGE** story.
The implications are mega.
Micro-Protein
1. We don't know what most of them do YET.
2. Finding what they do is a perfect job for machine learning. We'll be learning fast.
3. Understanding what they all do will be a whole new info layer about us human beans.
4. It's very likely many new pharmaceutical "targets" will be found, especially for highly personalized medicine. New opportunities will emerge for such as MS, Alzeimer's, and all the chronic diseases.
5. Health optimization targets likewise will be found. Longer healthspans and such.
6. Presumably Alpha Fold can describe thousands more micro-proteins as another jump in knowledge.
7. My personal belief (that complex combinations of micro-proteins are what makes the placebo effect work) will be confirmed. Exciting, no?
Call me a wild eyed optimist, but the pace of new discoveries in the health sciences is downright encouraging. I read a good deal in the field (looking up words a lot), and when something leaps out to me, I make a blog post. This one really leaps.
For a far more professional take on these developments, check out the papers linked to below.
*https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-024-10948-1 (also https://www.mdc-berlin.de/news/press/evolution-miniproteins-appeared-nowhere)
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