Scientists Discover Something New Living Inside Us

Thousands of weird "obelisks" were found in our mouth and gut bacteria for the first time

Hiya!

I’ve spent most of my life assuming that, besides consciousness, scientists had pretty much figured out everything there was to know about the human body and how it works. Only since I started this newsletter did I learn how wrong my assumptions were. Because while science has figured out a lot, there are plenty of mysteries our bodies still hold.

Even more curious is that scientists are still discovering things about us — like the wave of death or that the cells in our body align with a mysterious pattern found throughout nature. And now researchers have found something entirely new and unexpected — strange, tiny obelisks living within bacteria in our mouths and guts. But they still aren’t sure what these obelisks do.

The Discovery

Stanford University biologist Andrew Fire, his graduate student Ivan Nikolay Zheludev, and Fire’s colleagues searched through an RNA database holding thousands of single-stranded circular RNA molecule sequences from human stools.

RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is similar to DNA except that while DNA has a double-stranded helix of “letters,” or base pairs, RNA has only a single strand. RNA generally uses instructions within DNA’s double helix to create functional products, like proteins.

Over 200 viruses, including Covid-19, Ebola, and various Flu strains, have genomes made of only RNA, which allows them to bypass DNA. This is because the virus genomes include RNA sequences that form a shell and ribozymes, which are enzymes that allow viruses to copy themselves once inside a cell.

However, the Standford researchers observed thousands of distinct loops of RNA that didn’t use DNA instructions to code for proteins. Such behavior is more common in viroids, which are even smaller than viruses.

We’ll discuss viruses and viroids in a moment, but the researchers said their obelisk observations weren’t quite either. Instead, they said it’s a newly discovered biological entity that falls somewhere between the two.

In the study, the team describes them as “viroid-like colonists of the human microbiome,” though they named them “obelisks” because of their shape, which is “rod-like” due to two genes self-organizing into a rod-like formation. The name also offers some wiggle room in case the obelisks end up being more like RNA plasmids, which are a different sort of genetic material within bacteria.

Once the team observed the obelisks, they analyzed data on the mouth and gut microbiome of 472 people from previous studies and found obelisks in almost 10 percent of the samples.

While the study is still in preprint form, posted to the BioRxiv server on January 21, 2024, and hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, it’s creating quite a stir already as two major science publications, Science and Nature, have written extensively about it.

Kathleen Hefferon, a microbiologist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved in the research, told Scientific American the findings are “super thrilling,” while microbiologist turned scientific journalist Saima May Sidik calls it “wildly weird,” in her Nature article.

What Are The Obelisks?

So, exactly, what are these ‘weird’ obelisks residing inside our bodies? Well, researchers are still working it out, but to understand what they’ve learned so far, we’ll need to venture into the quantum world.