A New Obelisk ‘Lifeform’ Is Hiding Inside Humans
We’re not sure if it’s exciting or not that scientists just discovered new ‘lifeforms’ inside of our bodies. Tiny bits of RNA, smaller than a virus, colonize bacteria inside our mouths and guts and have the power to transfer information that can be read by a cell.
Dubbed ‘wildly weird’ by the team of Stanford scientists writing about the find in Nature, the discovery now has a name: obelisks. And we… don’t really know their end goal.
“It’s insane,” said Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to Science. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”
Named obelisks because of their rod-shaped structures, they are even smaller than viruses, but they can still transmit instructions to cells. What they’re saying, however, we just don’t know. The microscopic entities, according to an explanation written in The Conversation by University of Bath microbial evolution professor Ed Feil, calls the obelisks “circular bits of genetic material that contain one or two genes and self-organize into a rod-like shape.”
Fascinating.