2024's Biggest Breakthroughs in Biology and Neuroscience
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ธ.ค. 2024
- We investigate three of 2024’s biggest breakthroughs in biology including new understanding of the common ancestor of all modern life, a surprising discovery about the connection between the brain and the immune system, and the ongoing impact of AI on the field of biology which led to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for researchers working on protein structure prediction and protein design.
Read about more breakthroughs from 2024 at Quanta Magazine: www.quantamaga...
00:05 Modern Life's Ancient Ancestor
An interdisciplinary group applied the latest tricks of phylogenetics - using genes and genomes to build evolutionary trees - to trace all of modern life back to our shared ancestor. This ancient cell, or population of cells, is known as LUCA, which stands for “last universal common ancestor,” the one from which everything alive today emerged. The work suggested that LUCA was a surprisingly complex cell and dated LUCA to some 4.2 billion years ago - earlier than researchers had thought.
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04:50 Surprising Brain-Body Connection
One of the most mind-blowing discoveries of the year is about the integration of the brain and body. Most immunologists have long assumed that the immune system is self-regulating. For the first time, researchers have found a neural circuit, located in the brainstem, that adjusts the immune system. This circuit senses inflammatory molecules in the body and then dials their levels up or down to protect healthy tissues
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09:18 AI Transforms Protein Science
In 2024, hardly a week could go by without some big new paper related to Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2: a neural network that can accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of a folded protein from the one-dimensional string of its amino acid molecules In May, Google DeepMind released AlphaFold3, which predicts the shapes of proteins as they interact with other molecules. Then, in October, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to John Jumper and Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind, the creators of AlphaFold2, and David Baker from the University of Washington, who revolutionized the design of proteins using AI.
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It's LUCAs fault that we have to pay taxes and do laundry
😂
My name is LUCA. I live on the second floor...
@@musicalneptunian😂
It's LUCA'S fault for your existence
It's my fault I know
It feels like Biology is going through a golden age, the breakthroughs are insane, especially compared to Physics.
Physics walked so Biology could run. A lot of the breakthroughs/developments in biology right now are on the back of breakthroughs made in physics in the 20th century.
Yea definitely. Side effect of insane amounts of compute resources.
Litteral biological golden age to rival the physics one we had in the 1940s.
Dude we have China just pumping out all sorts of frankenstein shit including as of recent a coronavirus according to the US Government lmfao
@@MrKiachExactly! These are not completely separate fields. We are building continuously on top of others.
@@MrKiach I've often had that thought recently. After the false mania over biotech for a short while in the 90s, it felt like the field had dropped off, when really things just slowly built and waited for AI to get powerful enough. It seems we are now at where physics was in the 1920s, when relativity and quantum physics manifested in technological change.
The results were most dramatically shown during the Manhattan Project and the Moon landing, which permanently changed geopolitics and then how we see ourselves. But a lot kept happening after that - it was just the most obvious manifestation.
There's also a lot of talk like, "We have been to the Moon but can't..." talk. That talk happens because we cracked physics but not biology.
how is LUCA a breakthrough? just a weak theory
This channel helped me discover my purpose in life, and effectively ignited a passion and love for science and research within me. In a year I’ll be entering university and working towards a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. I’m intensely excited. Thank you for these videos, they are fantastic.
Best of luck in your studies! Thanks for all future works and breakthroughs that you'll no doubt be involved in :)
Hey man, hope u find a happy life. I am interested if you can share with us your purpose, it may enlighten someone.
Bravo for you and best of good fortune in your new career!
@@TheBoringInvestorMan Thank you so much! I can't wait to get into the industry! There are so many caring and intelligent people working hard out there; working alongside them is like a dream to me.
@@theAMR1 Thank you for your kind words sir, I really appreciate it. To be honest, all I really want to do is diligently improve myself and expand my realm of understanding in a valuable way which can be of service to others. If this is by deepening the science community's understanding of specific notions, or even paving a path towards new destinations, any endeavor I take will provide me with great fulfilment. With that said, having a profound and instinctive curiosity is another factor which drives me. Thank you for asking :)
Understanding is amazing. People who devote their lives to understanding are heroes.
Best job in the world.
Practically, its more about questioning. Understanding being the byproduct. But yeah, I get your point!
As understanding expands questions become more precise its a feedback loop. Cellular memory may be the primary angentic tool (cellbiologist Prof Michael Levin's work)
Inflammatory response control would be wild
Not a problem: it's called turmeric. When used in conjunction with black pepper, it has a REMARKABLE ability to regulate the body's inflammatory response. I've been using it for about 14 years now, to prevent my finger joints from developing osteoarthritis, which i am prone to, being someone who does massages for a living: my metacarpal and finger joints often become quite sore, and without a decent dose of turmeric (1 to 2 inches of raw root chewed well, depending upon the roots' thickness, later in a meal where you start out with something you put a goodly dose of black pepper on) they even become stiff after a night's sleep. The turmeric does a FABULOUS job. I also use formulations which contain a concoction of chondroitin, MSN, boron, glucosamine, hyaluric acid and a good anti-inflammatory agent such as boswellia...but oddly enough the turmeric + piperine combo produces better overall results than this jumble of supposed cartiledge-building substances.
@@altareggoI am from India and we have been using this exact remedy for centuries if not more.
@@altareggo Actually a recent study shows that this is not true, but was falsely repeated from somebody who wrote a lot of fraudulent papers about Tumeric. Can only recommend to read up on it!
@@Fabianvolf Could you provide the name for the study?
Turmeric for inflammation always sounded "hopus focus" to me
Loving these 2024's Biggest Breakthroughs videos. Can't wait for the next one!
The Nobel prize of chemistry is in this video.
@@eSKAone- oops
Can't wait for computer science
They do these every year 🗓️
@@AchwaqKhalid I know but theres multiple each year
Protein folding predictions by AI sounds like pure science fiction. What a time to be alive!
In the near future, bioengineers can basically be like:
“OK, we need to create this kind of protein to perform this type of function to combat emergence of XYZ disease. Let me run this by the computer to get the exact sequence of amino acids needed to construct it. Then we’ll just use CRISPR 3.0 to generate the blue prints to induce these cells into becoming factories for this protein.”
Insanely exciting stuff!
@@n10do This is what's so cool about the future implications of this stuff. The possibilities are essentially endless. Obviously there's probably a helluva long way to go before we can do it practically but the implications are mind boggling.
I give it 5 years. You can do it now, with the appropriate access to things
IT'S BEEN THERE FOR 65 YEARS!!!! LINUS POLING MR!!!!!!
I wait for this more than the Nobel Prize.
My vagus nerve is damaged. For my headaches, my neurologist has prescribed 400 mg of vitamin B2 Biboflavin, and we did nerve block. I have been diagnosed with incomplete lupus. I am about to go on an 8-week course of self-hypnosis to calm down my nervous system and hopefully change my brain patterns in how my brain reacts to pain. Thank you for the video it was very interesting.
Best of luck to you and your medical team.
I’m so grateful for all the work people of quanta magazine do! Thank you for all the amazing articles and videos!
We got designer proteins before GTA 6
Can you guys also make one for the field of chemistry? Maybe it's not your expertise, but I am sad to see that there are only math, physics, and biology breakthroughs every year.
Coming from someone who studied biotechnology and thought a lot about the protein folding problem, this is a really insane breakthrough. In the future, I may try and do something about auto-immune disorders such as psoriatic arthritis, and the research results about the vagus nerve may come in handy. Great advances overall!
Thank you Girth Job 😊❤
If there was ever a time to try this, this is the time
precisely
Wow, It’s incredible how AI can predict the randomness of protein folding !
Fuck yeah! I took that neuroimmunology stuff as an extra work to my biochem exam in september. It's fantastic to see it here at the end of the year.
Brilliantly explained and sincere congratulations to EVERYONE involved in this project
Any idea which programme was used to make these awesome videos?
Everyone concerned about LUCA, NO ONE wants to talk about big brother FUCA 😭 He's a good boy, I swear.
Timestamps PLEASE!!!!
Kudos 🎉👏🏼 to the producers of this video, and naturally the microbiologists and scientists involved in 🧬 gene and proteins production.
Thanks 👍🏼 for sharing 🙏🏼.
One indirect way of observing the link between the Vagus Nerve and the immune system is that some immune cells have acetylcholine receptors on them. When the acetylcholine binds to the receptors, it alters the immune function of the cells, and the acetylcholine is provided by the parasympathetic nervous system, which includes the Vagus Nerve.
YESSSSSS, it's another 2024 biggest breakthroughs... MARRY ME quanta magazine 🥰🥰🥰
What 😂
Can you design a protein to get rid of plastic?
If you mean enzyme then I think some people are trying.
@@milfordgunnie4599 enzymes I know, thought maybe with proteins this works too?
There are already proteins (made by bacteria) that eat plastic
@@garcipat enzymes are protein
@wallahhabibiiii thanks for clarify. i thought something like thatnBut dont have deeper knowledge in that field.
Love these, never stop, look forward to and watch all of them every year. Will show my daughter them as she grows older.
Absolutely mindblown with the predictive capabilities of AI on protein folding. As a Medical doctor i can only fanthom how many monoclonal antibodies we could design to treat so many different untreatable cancer, autoimmune diseases and metabolic diseases in as short as a decade. This could advance the practice of medicine as we know it.
This series is fascinating! Loving it
It seems like LUCA was just a really chill guy/gal.
I'd definately invite it to my birthday party.
LUCA is responsible for all the wars and hatred 💀
We got a universal common ancestor face reveal before GTA VI
Is there gonna be chemistry?
Absolutely fascinating, especially the idea of inflammatory homeostasis.
3. Candidate is actually some kind of eastern blotting, holy grail of biology... ❤
The Vegas nerve never transmits what happened last night
I’ve poured so much effort into this video. I’d love for you to watch it and share your thoughts!
U did it bro? Good job 👍👏
@@questmarq7901 yeah, i made it by AI
Great show ,thanks!
I love this channel thank you guys for the content its really inspiring
Great channel
LUCA is cool, the entire process from LUCA to us has always been fascinating but when I read about the inflammation modulator in the brain stem it gives you a good feeling knowing that a good chunk of systemic bodily pathologies have a potential pathway to a (dare I say) potential solution. But the protein folding progress, although definitely has a much higher ceiling (In many fields), feels like a precursor to some nefarious things we cannot even comprehend yet is troubling and can seem like another version of pandoras box (what we can potentially expect when we completely unlock AI).
So why or what caused did the other (different) LUCAs to die off?
Given the size of Earth, and the many open niches, it’s hard to believe that only one LUCA population survived….
How was Our LUCA formed/assembled?
It was probably an anaerobic organism, so when photosynthesis came along it probably had a hard time
I can't wait for breakthrough in Computer science
14:26 ...and the fourth is national security/defence (war) ?!?!
would be nicer to have these reviews as quarterly since by the end of the year its old news
It's not old news 🗞️ to me!
Would love to see a Biggest Breakthroughs in medicine
Thank you for this video
I've been waiting for this. Thank you for the upload! It was a delight.
Personally I'm speechless about the new possibilities that AI assisted protein design will offer, I could fantasize for days
Thank you all for your valuable contributions and to youTube for informing me ~
Peaceful Christmas wishes to all ~ LJ ~
Why no video about breakthroughs in chemistry?
Breakthroughs for computer science next please
I really love watching these yearly serially look forward to it every time
I heard Luka lived on the second floor
vagus nerve hypothesis: now Doctors can says that "well, there's nothing apparently wrong with you. you just need to eat healthy, drink lots of water, exercise, get plenty of sleep and go outside" even more confidently
we know luca lived on the second floor
I live upstairs from you...
😂
so if we tickle vagus-nerve it would help your immune system to work better?
"yet it existed within about two, three, 400 MILLION years of earth forming as a planet"
Great stuff.
can we get a Biggest Breakthrough in Chemistry next year?
LOVE THESE VIDEOS💯GOD DESIGNED US SO CRAZY😳🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
UW Seattle - Woot!!!
LUKA situation is crazy
What was look alike ?
Look, I'm tech and science literate, but I'm also more of a practical than a theory guy. And frankly I've been hearing about Alphafold for years and I'm still not sure what the hell is the point of it. When it came out everyone was acting like pollution was solved and cancer cured but so far I've seen none of that. Did ANY actual, tangible product or use case come out of this?
It has had significant use cases that can be found in the literature
@PackMowin Cool, it allowed progress in the stabilization of polyphenol phosphates for the manufacturing of sulfurized hydrocarbonate chains or whatever. Ok, but who tf cares?
what has happened so far is just the groundwork. it's probably still gonna take years or decades until the first practical uses are fully developed, but it's incredible to even be able to begin these processes. rome wasn't built in a day
Technologies like this hold a lot of potential for structure based drug design but you have to realize that designing, testing and getting approval for a drug takes like 10-15 years and the vast majority of projects end up not working out
It would be great to produce food that doesn't cause inflammation instead of altering the vagus nerve to reduce inflammation.
I hardly think vagus nerve stuff is merely 2024 breakthrough tbh, and it being suprising is also weird to say imo...
Waiting for computer science
Not much left for computer science, since AI is now physics and chemistry.😅
What if they missed an earlier evolutionary variant? Doesn't it mean they missed a crucial step of a gene development event thus not accurately
Omg Rika! She's the sweetest person irl and absolutely brilliant. So happy to see her appear on my favorite science series
oh thanks!
"Great video on protein folding, but how does predicting basic amino acid shapes help with practical applications like brain development or treating diseases? A follow-up on its real-world impact would be amazing!"
"Why are you using quotation marks?" queried beetlejuciefan.
Thank you for sharing with us this video on the modern biology .
I love these videos
Do humans have Wi-Fi? Thoughts that can link to human and other animal via a computer?
Unfortunately I don't think so
6:42 he says "what other zillion examples" not "what other silly examples" ^^ To whoever makes the subtitles
Everytime they say "it's the beginning"
this is so excited! also golden age for biology
Absolutely gorgeous.
Surely you should have said that the two domains of life are Bacteria and Archaea, rather than continuing to use the paraphyletic notion of prokaryotes in 2024? We know now that eukaryotes are deeply embedded within the Asgardarchaeota clade, and so they cannot be a separate domain of life.
Eukaryotes and bacteria aren’t even a clade??? Mind = blown
Thats not what they said. We still think of the three kingdoms (archaea, eukarya, prokaryota) as individual, monophyletic clades. Going back further you have their common ancestor, LUCA.
@@bluesmanshoes Prokaryota are not a monophyletic clade, but a paraphyletic grouping of archaea and bacteria, and eukaryotes are deeply nested within the archaeal clade, a type of asgard archaeon, rather than a separable third domain. However, eukaryotes are a valid clade themselves, and so are bacteria. This is like the situation w birds, which are a type of maniraptoran dinosaur, but a valid clade within it nonetheless.
They trying to turn me into a walking bomb? Feels like cold all over shaky veins. Gov put a canister in my heart somehow. Nanotechnology?
Take your meds??
LUCA came from space on a meteor
You mechs may have copper wiring to reroute your fear of pain, but I've got nerves of steel.
Great
Luca was Judith's nephew.
If you're calling something LUCA that clearly isn't LUCA then what term are you reserving for actual LUCA?
What do you mean by this? LUCA stands for "last universal common ancestor" and we are using it to mean exactly that. It is the most recent ("last") ancestor of all known extant life (therefore "universal common ancestor"). That is exactly how it's being used.
Are you perhaps thinking of the first living thing? That would be the *first* universal common ancestor (FUCA).
If LUCA was already somewhat sophisticated and dates back to 4.2 billion years ago and LUCA loved extreme heat and wasn't the only life form at the time , jus the only one to survive till today, and if the earth is only 4.5 billion years old it makes me wonder if theia or gaia had life before the collision
I found it suprising that LUCA could have emerge 4.2B years ago during the Hadean age (basically the Earth was just lava right..? Im a biologist not a geologist and although it is written in the article that one other scientist asked the same question, no proper answer was given...).
For me it is not a breaktrhough.. sorry not sorry
Life is common
Complex life from which kardashev civilizations can grow are clearly rare though
How can a LUCA show up just 300 millions of years after the formation of the Earth? Suddenly the panspermia hypothesis makes more sense!
Do you even know what a single million years is? bro if 300 millions is not enough, what is a reasonable time spam for you?
@@JaredQueiroz Bro, if 300 million years on a hot stone ball are enough to develop bacteria and similar stuff then life should be found on Titan and other places in this solar system too. And in many other solar systems.
❤
Nice paper, interesting. But there is still plenty of unanswered question that should be addressed, one of like e.g. where the information inside of LUCA emerged from, how and most importantly, why.
we developed from sea worms. corals are half plant half animal
16:25 lol
Lieb ich!!!!
What’s the deal with the voice over guy ending every sentence with an exhale. Why???
this luca gnome mapping sounds very solid, unshakable methodology right there haha
Anyone else thinking TERAFORMING?!!
So it’s LUCA and not Adam and Eve?
Luca Goers
Knowing even people from thousands of years before Darwin whom theorized all animals might have stemmed from one root this whole video comes as a joke to me. What makes Darwin special isn't that he brought evolution to the table, he was special because he was the first to sort some specific kinds of material to prove his point but even that can be seen lacking from todays point of view.
Protein engineering is the future
I’m betting a billion USD some Christian is gonna comment some 4000 year old earth stuff.
And then? If you're being a real scientist then you'd had to admit that anything is possible. I could be a brain in a vat or a Boltzmann brain. You can't even prove to others that you are conscious. The only thing I know is true is the existence of my own consciousness. Everything else in unprovable. Even math, because it is built on unprovable axioms.
@@eSKAone-LMAO, CRASH OUT
Where is the money
It is actually the church orgs, the marketing money they used to spend on other avenues now also target comment sections to push for followers, new suckas born every day.
Why are atheists obsessed with us