Can stem cells be engineered to create a life form

[Christopher]

Can stem cells be engineered to create a life form?

 

If a stem cells have the potential to become any cell type of an organism, can there be designed a

basic geometric and dynamical substrate that could spontaneously assemble a colony of stem cells into self sustained organism?

[C1ay]

What a thought provoking idea. Maybe someone should try experimenting with some animal's stem cells to avoid the political crowd and see how possible this is.

[Christopher]

What a thought provoking idea. Maybe someone should try experimenting with some animal's stem cells to avoid the political crowd and see how possible this is.

 

 

Yes exactly, how do I go about acquiring some fish stem cells ? I have an idea. here's a hint.

 

"All creation or destruction of forms, or morphogenesis, can be described by the disappearance of the attractors representing the initial forms, and their replacement (by capture) by the attractors representing the final forms." Rene Thom

[Christopher]

I believe I can accomplish this in a novel way utilizing a wave function focused onto and into a special kind of dissipating geometric substrate. One that can transmit information between cells to create as a basin of attraction that connect for critical cell types in steps . A “Morphological singularity” should result as a threshold is reached.

 

The initial substrate form “dissipates.” (disappears) and leaves in its place another higher form, a complex organism.

 

 

 

 

The comparison of living things to flames has ancient roots in the work of Heraclitus (c. 536 B.C.) who saw the world's objects as flow structures whose identity is defined and maintained through the incessant flux of components. Fire, as Aristotle (1947, p. 182) wrote centuries later in De Anima, stressing the active agency and generalized metabolism of such systems, "alone of the primary elements [earth, water, air, and fire] is observed to feed and increase itself." These ideas are at the root of today's understanding of spontaneously ordered or self-organizing systems. In particular, such systems are autocatakinetic. An autocatakinetic system is defined as one that

 

maintains its "self" as an entity constituted by, and empirically traceable to, a set of nonlinear (circularly causal) relations through the dissipation or breakdown of field (environmental) potentials (or resources), in the continuous coordinated motion of its components (from auto- "self" + cata- "down" + kinetic, "of the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith" from kinein, "to cause to move")(Swenson, 1991, 1995; Swenson & Turvey, 1991).

 

http://www.entropylaw.com/thermoevolution9.html

[learnin to learn]

Steam cell research... how would one store steam cells?

[HydrogenBond]

Stem cells can form any other cell, but a multicellular organism is composed of a bunch of differentiated cells all working together. One could create a multicellular lifefore by building it piece meal. Or one can do it like nature. Nature appears to set up one or more gradients so that stem cells differntiate in different directions. One possible area of control may be the cell membrane potential. Cells have a range of cellular membrane potentials. One might set a high potential and a low potential pole to differentiate two extreme cellular membrane potentials or cellular differentiations. These two will set up their own potential, thereby creating intermediary differentiations, etc.

[Christopher]

Stem cells can form any other cell, but a multicellular organism is composed of a bunch of differentiated cells all working together. One could create a multicellular lifefore by building it piece meal. Or one can do it like nature. Nature appears to set up one or more gradients so that stem cells differntiate in different directions. One possible area of control may be the cell membrane potential. Cells have a range of cellular membrane potentials. One might set a high potential and a low potential pole to differentiate two extreme cellular membrane potentials or cellular differentiations. These two will set up their own potential, thereby creating intermediary differentiations, etc.

 

 

I like the way you think.

 

 

 

Vesica Attractor

Another key in the self-making ability of the embryonic material that forms the vesica attractor is in it's ability to shape-shift around the tendency of a fluid to seek an ordered path though and around a medium. This medium having a fine balance of cohesion and plasticity.

The next key is in the mineral content of the spheres. Aragonite, this form of calcium carbonate has properties that promote microbial growth and acts as a mineral substrate for initiating an autopoetic biochemical cycle. This mineral has been discovered to be a fundamental element in maintaining an autopoetic system in coral reefs and closed artificial systems such as salt water aquariums.

Another important roll of the oolites is in their ability to act as a dynamic scaffolding. As the aragonite spheres dissolve though chemical and mechanical forces, a synergy unfolds throughout the emerging structure, As the oolites shrink they become point attractors among the eukaryote cells, that have now adopted the fluid energetic pattern left by the cyanobacteria filaments. As the oolites lose mass they induce the production of new filaments that emerge from the outer cellular membranes of the eukaryotes. Anchoring proteins extend through the plasma membrane to link to the emerging cytoskeleton structure. Simply put, as the temporary oolitic scaffolding deconstructs, it constructs it's permanent replacement. These Anchoring-type junctions not only hold cells together but provide tissues with structural cohesion. These junctions are produced more abundantly in tissues that are subject to higher mechanical stress such as the outer skin and heart. Connective tissues begin forming flexible geodesic scaffolding by drawing in and connecting to points in space where the oolites have now vacated. These connecting points form the extracellular matrix, meanwhile the vesica apertures acts as a cycle attractor spiraling inward keeping a central tension as the embryo loses mass and takes shape, simultaneously providing a flow of renewing sea water though the recursive system as it pulses in time with wave cycles. The central apertures begins to coil in slack in the form of a layered network of connected cells. This dense mass of wound together cells will form heart tissue. This tension that connects eukaryote cells in a medium of cohesion is called (tensegrity). Tensegrity results in a crystallization of connections in the architecture of the emerging organism, enabling the individual cell though it's own intracellular matrix to respond to a potential fitness space. This crystallization of the recursive dynamic structure might well result in an "algorithmic self-assembly" of genetic probabilities.

Developing layers of the body plan are connected from heart, shell, exo-skeleton or notochord, down to the strands of DNA in the cells nucleus by this network of filaments, thus tuning the cells information bank to circuits of communication though the internal structure, then out to the universe at large. A current of information begins to flow between the micro-cellular universe below to a cognitive landscape of the macro-universe above. "Cogito ergo sum"

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

"Morphology is not only a study of material things and of the forms of material things, but has its dynamical aspect ... in terms of force, of the operations of energy. This is a great theme. Boltzmann, writing in 1886 on the second law of thermodynamics, declared that available energy was the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world" D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1917

..to (in)form buildings with thematic meaning, they must convey a gestalt, the whole must be more than the sum of the parts, and there must also be an ambiguity and paradox immanent within that gestalt, as a tension. (And quoting Heckscher on composition...) It is the taut composition which contains contrapuntal relationships, equal combinations, inflected fragments, and acknowledged duality's. It is the unity which maintains, but only just maintains, a control over the clashing elements which compose it. Chaos is very near, its nearness, but its avoidance, gives ...force" Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966

 

"There is geometry in the humming of the strings... there is music in the spacing of the spheres". Pythagoras

[Christopher]

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Research published in Nature tomorrow (21 July) will outline for the first time the stem cell origin of the structure of the neck and shoulders in vertebrates. The scientists believe that instead of groups of stem cells creating the skeletal and muscle structure separately they actually appear to make them together as a sort of 'composite'. This could have significant implications for clinical medicine and our understanding of vertebrate evolution...

 

...Dr Georgy Koentges, one of the lead researchers at UCL, said, "Anatomists and everyone else would look at the skeleton and assume that the bone structures are uniform and are the basic components of vertebrate organisation. Our research suggests this is wrong and actually groups of stem cells create not only the muscles of the neck and shoulder but also the skeletal structure where these muscles are attached. These groups of stem cells are making scaffolds of connections early during embryonic development which are later embellished and filled by other cells: just like the scaffold of a house which is later filled in by bricks, mortar and windows. If cells are from the same stem cell origin they 'stick together' throughout their life – normally without us noticing it."

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2005/07/21/scientists_discover_stem_cell_origin_of_neck_and_shoulders.html

[Christopher]

Until quite recently, such comparisons could only be made by looking at physical characteristics such as the structure of bones, teeth, or tissues. But DNA sequencing now permits scientists to make comparisons of the genetic code and read evolutionary history from it. An international consortium involving researchers from EMBL, the UK, France and the United States has now sequenced a part of the Platynereis genome. "The fraction of Platynereis genes we have been able to look at tells a very clear story," says researcher Florian Raible, who performed most of the computer analyses. "The worm’s genes are very similar to human genes. That's a much different picture than we've seen from the quickly-evolving species that have been studied so far."

 

Raible is member of both Arendt's group and a second EMBL lab, that of Peer Bork, whose specialty is analyzing genomes by computer. "Human genes are typically more complex than those of flies," explains Bork. "Classicallystudied species like flies have far fewer introns, so many scientists have believed that genes have become more complex over the course of evolution. There have already been speculations that this may not be true, but proof was missing. Now we have direct evidence that genes were already quite complex in the first animals, and many invertebrates have reduced part of this complexity."

 

Not only are the introns there – the team also discovered that their positions within genes have been preserved over the last half a billion years." This gives us two independent measurements that tell the same story," Raible explains. "Most introns are very old, and they haven't changed very much in slowly-evolving branches of life, such as vertebrates or annelid worms. This makes vertebrates into something like 'living fossils' in their own right."

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051124221029.htm