Unconventional

by Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen

There are about 8 billion people living on our planet today. It's a lot. But consider the following: one human body harbours about 380 trillion viruses and 39 trillion bacteria - both on our skin and underneath it. That means there are thousands of times more organisms living off one of us than there are humans living off the whole Earth. So, as you stroll down a snow-clad path on a crisp and sunny winter's afternoon, thinking how wonderful it sometimes is to be alone, from a purely biological point of view you are not. Your body is literally teeming with organisms that use you as convenient terrain to reproduce, multiply and spread. The great majority of these organisms - viruses, bacteria and fungi - belong to what is called our microbiome. Over the years, we have formed some kind of understanding with our microbiome, and we all get on together fairly well on a give and take basis. As an illustration, the sum of viruses we carry, our virome, is thought to have an overall role in keeping our immune system alert. In this light, scientists recently discovered a novel immune strategy used by our brain cells to prevent the herpes virus from infecting them. The mechanism involves a protein known as TMEFF1.

SwissProt
Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. Follow us: Subscribe · Twitter · Facebook

More from Protein Spotlight

LIFE, LOVE, DEATH & PROTEINS

La vie etc. cover

"La vie, l'amour, la mort & les protéines" (in French only) is a wonderful and unique collection of twenty comic strips created with Geneva-based cartoonist aloys lolo. Each comic describes one protein taken from the Protein Spotlight articles. The album was published in November 2023 by Antipodes, Switzerland. Order your copy online.

JOURNEY INTO A TINY WORLD

Journey Into A Tiny World cover

« Globin and Poietin set out to save Lily's life. But time is running short and they can't find the marrow... Here is the tale of their courage, fun and laughter on a journey that takes them deep into the tiniest of worlds.» For children. Learn more and order your copy online.

Snapshot : Countins

It is crucial for a tissue to stop growing, once there is enough of it. The proportions of every living entity are predefined for a reason – and not simply for the sake of aesthetics. If our brains didn’t stop growing, we would become top heavy and our heads would tilt and droop helplessly on one side, making life somewhat inconvenient. The same goes for the slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum.

A little bit of praise!

“I recently stumbled upon your columns. Let me congratulate you on achieving the near impossible, for your articles have enabled me to successfully marry IT with the Life Sciences and better explain the concepts of bioinformatics to those who are not in the know of the field.

Your articles are very well written, lucid, and contain just enough information to excite the reader to want to learn more about the topic being discussed. They fall in a very rare category where they are accessible to everyone, from the undergraduate students to research students who want to have a basic idea of the topics being discussed. Some of your articles, like "Our hollow architecture" and "Throb" are outstanding pieces.

I would highly recommend your articles as a necessary reading in undergrad classes to get students inspired about the various avenues of research.”

— Rohan Chaubal, Senior Researcher in Genomics

Thank you to Nicholas D. Wolfson whose work we reproduce on our site!