Animals that eat their own brains might give us a cure for COVID-19
Also why time both speeds up and slows down during a pandemic. And why a mosquito that has invaded Africa is causing concern.
We are nearly a month into 2021. Does it feel any different from 2020? How have you been?
Perceiving time in a pandemic
Let me describe how the last year has cognitively felt to me. One the one hand, there has been a constant overload of information and visceral emotional reactions. On the other, there has been almost no serendipity or spontaneity- I’ve stopped seeing new places and meeting new people. I suspect this will create a very skewed perception of time when we are back to "normal”.
Right now, what we are going through is hyperawareness of what is going on every month. From our first flight-or-flight responses last year to being oversaturated and blunted by fear, grief, and disgust at the constant news-cycle this year.
But later, time will contract. Or rather, it will seem to contract. Researchers have found that the brain uses memorable events as timestamps. Stuck at home with no discernable memories, the days and months may become a blur. It may all be one massive blur of misremembering.
When we are on vacation, time flashes by: later, looking at photos, it seems to expand and fill more than just the few days we were away. I suspect the pandemic may have the opposite effect on our minds. In the moment, while we are living day to day, it may seem interminable. Bereft of the markers of memorability (for some of us) later it will collapse into a neutron star of time.
A COVID-19 drug from a brain-eating animal
Last year, I was pretty excited about a paper published in Nature by leading academic chemical biologists and medicinal chemists. It was a brute force study in which they cloned nearly every gene for proteins that SARS-CoV-2 uses, and made recombinant versions of each viral protein. They then examined which human proteins these viral proteins interacted with.
The rationale was simple. If we can somehow disrupt the virus from communicating with host cellular machinery, we can stop the virus from replicating well inside cells. In that study, researchers identified 332 protein-protein interactions and 66 possible targets proteins for drugs. But perhaps most impressively, the group found 69 existing drugs for further testing in cells to see if they could treat COVID-19.
I was so excited that I didn’t just tweet about this study. I wrote about it and referenced it in my book, COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction .
Now, these scientists have extended that study in a research paper just published in Science. They have discovered that an existing drug, plitidepsin, is about 28 times more potent that the approved COVID-19 antiviral, remdesivir.
Plitidepsin ( which also goes by aplidin), has been approved for the treatment of multiple myeloma, but may be a gamechanger for COVID-19.
PharmaMar, is going ahead with phase III clinical trials. The pharmaceutical company claims the treatment can reduce the viral load by 99%, and will work against new variants of SARS-CoV-2. The compound belongs to a class of drugs known as natural products, and it is isolated from a rare marine sea squirt found in the waters close to the island of Ibiza.
Image credit: PharmaMar
Here’s an interesting fact about sea squirts that I have to get in before I end this segment. Sea squirts eat their own brains.
The juvenile sea squirt searches for a rock or coral to settle down on. When it finds one, it no longer has any need for its brain: it eats it.
A new mosquito is causing concern in Africa
Malaria is the single greatest killer in human history. The Anopheles mosquito which spreads the malaria-causing parasite from one human to another has been called "the most dangerous animal in the world". In many parts of the world malaria has been controlled. For example, Sri Lanka eliminated malaria from its shores. Though it has occasionally emerged due to travelers, this is a major feat.
Now, we have news from Africa that is not great. A primary mosquito vector in India, Anopheles stephensi, has spread across much of urban Africa. This is a mosquito that is suited to urban areas, unlike Anopheles mosquito species endemic across most of Africa.
Image credit: Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)
The Asian mosquito species was detected in the Horn of Africa in 2012 during an unusual outbreak of malaria in Djibouti City. More severe outbreaks have been occurring annually. This Asian mosquito has also been identified in Ethiopia and Sudan. A modeling study published last year predicted that over 126 million people who lived in Sub-Saharan Africa could be at risk of malaria. Another paper published just this month found that 75% of the water sources in an area of Ethiopia contain the Asian mosquito.
The invasion of the Asian strain is worrying because more than 40% of the people in sub-Saharan Africa live in urban environments. The World Health Organization has issued a vector alert for the Asian mosquito.
What else I’m reading:
The world’s oldest cave painting
Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest known animal cave painting in Indonesia - a wild pig - believed to be drawn 45,500 years ago.
The oldest drawing of any kind is a hashtag-like doodle from South Africa believed to be 73,000 years old.
The animal with the largest sequenced genome
The Australian lungfish has the largest animal genome ever sequenced. The fish has a whopping 43 billion base pairs, around 14 times longer than the human genome.
How these creatures got such large genomes is not known.
The insect apocalypse
Insects are dying out. And the consequences will be disastrous.
Are insects declining at an alarming rate? Yes, he says. Is it more complex than imminent global collapse? Also yes.
That’s it for this week.
Here’s the link to the Kindle version on Amazon.com.
Here’s the link to the hardcover version on Amazon’s Indian site.
Here’s an excerpt of the book in which I talk about how so many COVID-19 vaccines were developed so quickly (and why they’re not the same).
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Interesting to know about sea squirt! Hope the medicine works