podcast interview with Michael Levin
He is trying to create synthetic biology using bioelectricity and computer programming.
He states bioelectric signals are the SECRET to how morphology grows to a predetermined pattern EVEN if the initial parts are scrambled - the cells can adapt and are flexible.
All these "homeostatic points" in morphological development are "set" by bioelectric signals.
This is actually the Yuan Qi energy of the Yuan Shen.
He says DNA is the HARDWARE of the body while bioelectricity is the SOFTWARE.
How is this set point signal stored in the body? Voltage gradients in crayfish development - showed the ELECTRIC FACE before the actual face developed - where the eyes will be, etc.
You can recreate the pattern SOMEWHERE else and the body will create an eye in the stomach, etc.
A very specific bioelectric pattern is maintained...as a true memory - it's a little like non-volatile RAM in your computer -you can rewrite it - it runs an electrical circuit - how information is stored that is not in the genome.
The cytoskeleton was the original epigenetics as a kind of physical memory.
But actually, a few years ago, we found a pretty amazing phenomenon, which is that if you make so-called "Picasso frogs" -- these are tadpoles where the jaws might be off to the side, the eyes are up here, the nostrils are moved, so everything is shifted -- these tadpoles make largely normal frog faces. Now, this is amazing, because all of the organs start off in abnormal positions, and yet they still end up making a pretty good frog face. And so what it turns out is that this system, like many living systems, is not a hardwired set of movements, but actually works to reduce the error between what's going on now and what it knows is a correct frog face configuration.
it's basically called bioelectricity, non-neural bioelectricity. So it turns out that all cells -- not just nerves, but all cells in your body -- communicate with each other using electrical signals. And what you're seeing here is a time-lapse video. For the first time, we are now able to eavesdrop on all of the electrical conversations that the cells are having with each other. So think about this. We're now watching -- This is an early frog embryo. This is about eight hours to 10 hours of development. And the colors are showing you actual electrical states that allow you to see all of the electrical software that's running on the genome-defined cellular hardware. And so these cells are basically communicating with each other who is going to be head, who is going to be tail, who is going to be left and right and make eyes and brain and so on. And so it is this software that allows these living systems to achieve specific goals, goals such as building an embryo or regenerating a limb for animals that do this, and the ability to see these electrical conversations gives us some really remarkable opportunities to target or to rewrite the goals towards which these living systems are operating.
So the ability to see these bioelectrical signals is giving us an entry point directly into the software that guides large-scale anatomy, which is a very different approach to medicine than to rewiring specific pathways inside of every cell.
, there is an electrical gradient, head to tail, that's generated that tells the piece where the heads and the tails go and in fact, how many heads or tails you're supposed to have. So what we learned to do is to manipulate this electrical gradient, and the important thing is that we don't apply electricity. What we do instead was we turned on and off the little transistors -- they're actual ion channel proteins -- that every cell natively uses to set up this electrical state. So now we have ways to turn them on and off, and when you do this, one of the things you can do is you can shift that circuit to a state that says no, build two heads, or in fact, build no heads. And what you're seeing here are real worms that have either two or no heads that result from this, because that electrical map is what the cells are using to decide what to do.
These worms, when cut again and again, in the future, in plain water, they continue to regenerate as two-headed. Think about this. The pattern memory to which these animals will regenerate after damage has been permanently rewritten. And in fact, we can now write it back and send them back to being one-headed without any genomic editing. So this right here is telling you that the information structure that tells these worms how many heads they're supposed to have is not directly in the genome. It is in this additional bioelectric layer.
But not only these useful applications -- this is an amazing sandbox for learning to communicate morphogenetic signals to cell collectives. So once we crack this, once we understand how these cells decide what to do, and then we're going to, of course, learn to rewrite that information, the next steps are great improvements in regenerative medicine, because we will then be able to tell cells to build healthy organs. And so this is now a really critical opportunity to learn to communicate with cell groups, not to micromanage them, not to force the hardware, to communicate and rewrite the goals that these cells are trying to accomplish.
https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-HD081326-04
these techniques are distinct from classical methods of electric field application, and reveal not only the molecular-genetic sources of the gradients but also the epigenetic and transcriptional downstream steps through which biophysical properties regulate morphology.
interview with Dr. Michael Levin
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