Funnily enough the reason why virology therapy (something the Soviets did a lot of research in cuz they didn't have good antibiotics and biotech/pharma) hasn't seen much success at scale is precisely because the body's immune system adapts too quickly. Maybe we will see more success now with AI but it will be a cold day in hell before the powers that be let any garage biohacker have access to LLMs trained on this sort of information.
Why would you modify E coli for this? Use existing gut friendly bacteria and start from those. There's a wealth of material on the genetics of probiotics.
Um... E.coli is an existing gut friendly bacteria, one of the most common ones present in at least 90% of all humans' gut biome. There are only some specific strains which are pathogenous.
The phospholipid micelles are non-trivial (trade secret) to make and it's the major reason why African nations and other countries have not been able to successfully create mRNA vaccines at scale.
A cell is a bundle of proteins wrapped in a membrane that's sort of an oil drop (or as another comment said, a fat bubble). In biology it's called a phospholipid bilayer. Fun fact you can actually "merge" cells together with the help of certain viruses. Drug delivery usually involves moving molecules though this phospholipid bilayer which involves all sorts of tricks. There are pores and receptors on the membrane that can selectively bind to different biochemical molecules and proteins. A good chunk of research in bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, quantum computing is focusing on simulating protein binding dynamics and protein-protein interactions on various levels so we can design drugs that can bind to the receptors we want. (Alphafold made this a lot easier to figure out how to go from a sequence of genetic material to a specific protein shape) A RNA vaccine is kinda like a virus in that it has to be taken into a so the cellular machinery (ribosomes) can build the protein that it codes for. So having a micelle (or nanoparticle, whatever you want to call it) that can get absorbed and merged into the cell that you are targeting specifically is a Big Deal.
> getting infected with the zika virus (probably the best thing to do IMO
Virology based methods don't last very long because the immune system adapts quickly. If you want to go down that route, make sure you have experts on hand.
You should try to convince the others on the Facebook groups to undergo full genome DNA sequencing (around $1K USD, usually not covered by insurance, I would pay for the other patients if I were you, their data is more than worth it given it’s your life on the line) and submit the data to patient networks and orphan drug groups. There are lots of bioinformatics methods now (thanks to mostly advances in ML among other things) that can derive insights into the problem, without any physical assays or laboratory tests.
DNA sequencing has been done, we know the HLA[1] is a part of the disease. I don't think any more DNA will help find a cure or even a way to help. PSC is a complex "black box" disease. A person can have the DNA but not have the disease.
BUT... bile and fecal samples still seem to be of high value for data collection. I've spoken with the doctors at PSC Partners to start advocating this collection, but they've noted that they don't have a way to process and store. Yet other clinicians have been doing this. I want to look into this more to help bring it all together (data is fun!), but haven't had to the time (single parent).
The explanation doesn't get much better at higher levels. You have the Krebs cycle which biology people religiously memorize but it doesn't really explain much either. The actual interesting part is usually handwaved away as "magical enzyme/protein" catalysis. Understanding how the mitochondrial proteins/enzyme catalysts function would usually require a graduate degree, and maybe a background in biochemistry and biophysics.
If you haven't, I suggest you look up an on how ATP Synthase uses the proton gradient to create ATP. It's quite amazing. It's literally a little nano-machine.
Most of the pop sci books are useless for practical use cases, and similarly the Feynman lectures self select for the physics/mathematically inclined.
Biology is a leaky abstraction, it's very hard to do anything with rigor without having a strong foundation in the fundamentals. You see the same discussion on hacker news when it comes to music, people are more interested in mapping programming concepts to music notation and complaining about western music presentation than the music itself. For biology, you need need to have a firm understanding of the central dogma and biochemistry if you want to do anything beyond surface level empirical trial and error. Most people, especially the "hacker types", only have a vague understanding of the former i.e. DNA translation and transcription and that's about the limit. You absolutely have to gain an intuition for biochemistry if you want to do things with rigor, otherwise you will just be the biotech equivalent of a bootcamp web developer, fit for washing test tubes and not much else.
Absolutely right. These basic concepts like the central dogma aren't especially hard to learn, but it's important to really understand them deeply if you want anything to make sense.
Among textbooks, Molecular Biology of the Gene by James Watson et al. is a good starting point to understand the central dogma: DNA -> RNA -> Protein. Likewise Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al. for cell biology.
An Introduction to Systems Biology by Uri Alon is good for the more mathematically inclined once you're ready to get more advanced, though you should really have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of molecular and cellular biology first.
None of this is for the faint of heart, but it's not especially difficult either. It's unfortunate that it's hard to get hands-on experience with biology once you've graduated from college, which helps a lot to connect the dots, but there are still plenty of great resources out there.
Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of my all-time favorite books. Read it 15 years ago, rereading it now in the 7th (newest) edition. If someone has read the books you've listed, done the exercise and has a comprehensive understanding of the material, but no biology degree, only a passion for learning about cell biology, are there job options to keep feeding that passion?
Work/volunteer as a minimum wage software developer lab rat (or whatever your day job speciality is). There are plenty of labs that are in need of free labor when it comes to software/engineering support in general, just ask around.
If you're an experienced software developer, you can also just get a job as a software developer at any number of companies in pharma and biotech. No need to do it for free.
Funny thing : having never seen the term "central dogma" before, I looked it up, and Wikipedia says that this one (directly calling out your reference) is an incorrect version, in fact has been proven wrong in the last decades, while the original Central Dogma holds.
Even funnier thing : I kind of lied : I saw that term for the first time two weeks ago... when watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. Where it's a location. But then I guess it also throws around terms like "apoptosis" (which I did knew and which made me raise an eyebrow) as sciencey sounding words (still somewhat appropriate to the context in a metaphorical way), so of course it couldn't resist "Central Dogma" as a play on words between biology, location, and (anti-) "Orientalization" of Christianity !
The Wikipedia article is correct in a pedantic way, but for all practical purposes, DNA -> RNA -> Protein is the place to start. Then you layer on the myriad complications that have evolved over four billion years.
