Apparently this is more common with cats. If you see a cat with two different coat patterns, either divided down the middle or along the neck (as if they only had spare parts left at the cat factory), they may also be a chimera.
DNAddy
Submitted 2 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/c3a1ee80-9fd6-41a1-8fc4-bb0967ed06da.jpeg
Comments
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 2 weeks ago
I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
christopher@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Cool looking cat. I wants one
baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
“I’m not black! I’m a tabby, like you officer!”
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I wonder… is this more common in all animals that have average litter size >= 2? Or is there something else special to cats that explains this phenomenon?
Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
In-utero growth rate + chromosome counts play a big role. I admit, ashamedly, that I have largely forgotten the reason they matter, but they do.
Source, trust me bro
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Half and half chimera is just the more unique variant, iirc, at least for humans. The more common type would just look splotchy if the different parts even happen to color differently. The patterns usually follow Blaschko’s lines but don’t have to.
There are also more basic forms where people will just have certain body parts with different DNA, like an extra blood type or other less consequential things.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Whoa, that’s crazy. It’s basically like having two cats in one!
iThinkDifferentThanU@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Can’t even trust a brother you ate in utero
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
her eggs were cheating
MrShankles@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Nah, his sperm was unfaithful
snoons@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
100_kg_90_de_belin@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
Ultimate cuck
applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
but why would you assume he’s one brother or the other? he’s both brothers simultaneously, and neither, like Tuvix.
ferrule@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Tuvix was a blend of both, not parts of each. Chimeras end up having different DNA in different parts of their body but due to close enough biological relation there isn’t organ rejection.
bedwyr@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
There was a woman who went to prison for this, her chimera baby’s dna contradicted her story, I think to get public assistance of some kind, and the dna test convinced the state assholes she was lying and they sent her to prison, I think some researchers exonerated her eventually.
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Are you thinking of Lydria Fairchild? In her case she wasn’t sent to prison. However, her two children were taken from her and placed in foster care for a while. Lawyers were refusing to represent her, due to the belief that DNA evidence is too strong to fight. On the plus side, she was pregnant again. So a court officer was present during her third child’s birth.
Despite being at the birth and witnessing blood draws from both mother and child, the court still claimed she was being untruthful somehow. Thankfully, that birth and its evidence was peculiar enough to attract a lawyer to finally represent her. Only after that did the investigation into potential chimerism arise.
More info here - …asu.edu/…/case-lydia-fairchild-and-her-chimerism…
bedwyr@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
Might be I just heard it on a podcast, Poor Historians, Misadventures in Medical History, and I may have gotten the story wrong.
minorkeys@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Why are they assholes? Because they didn’t know about chimeras?
WiredBrain@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Because they don’t know the limits of their tools and were convinced they’re infallible, and as a result an innocent woman was punished by the state. Just a guess.
ReasonablePea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I mean unless they proved she was not providing for the kid I think they’re assholes. But I shouldn’t assume
kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Another fun-ish, kinda fucked up, weird story… There’s a woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had a biopsy for her cervical cancer in January of 1951 before passing in October of that year. These cells were found to be incredibly resilient and quick to replicate. Most cells only lasted a few days before dying, but hers seemed to be functionally immortal under controlled lab conditions.
So, unbeknownst to her as consent wasnt required for such things at the time, her cancer cells were cultured and grown into large samples to be used in research. Those samples were split off and passed off to other labs. They’ve since spread around the entire world for a ton of research and commercial purposes.
They were used in the development of the polio vaccine, for example, as well as having been used in research on cancer (obviously), AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic materials, gene mapping, etc. They are used to test safety of cosmetics as well. Approximately 11,000 patents involve these specific cancer cells.
In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta’s family to differentiate her cells from the others. This is the first time anyone in her family learned that her cells had been used in research at all, let alone that her cells were being cloned and used in research and commercial product development across the entire world. It became a legal issue after this, and after a couple decades of litigation, it made it to the Supreme Court of California where they ruled that “discarded biological materials” is no longer ones property and could be commercialized freely. They continue to occasionally fight against aspects of her cells’ usage, and they’re are health privacy concerns for her family as well, but results have been mixed for them.
Henrietta the person died in 1951 at age 31, but her immortal cancer cells which still contain her full DNA sequence continue to live to this day, 75 years later. One source claims that as much as 50 million metric tons of tissue has been generated from these cells.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
HeLa is extremely interesting, but still requires humans to cultivate her cells.
Canine transmissible venereal tumor however, is an immortal, contagious dog tumor from a dog thousands of years ago that evolved into its own parasitic lifeform that has continued to this day to spread from host to host. Yet, genetically, it is still “dog”.
Anyway, this is my answer when the job interviewer asks me about long-term goals.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta’s family to differentiate her cells from the others.
I don’t understand. First, what was the point? I doubt there was a way to split the sample attacked by a cancer cells, they probably weren’t going to recalibrate the transporter and untuvix them.
Second, weren’t there thousands of the copies of the sample? Why wouldn’t they compare it to one of them, instead of bothering the family?
kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That confused me as well. The stuff I read didn’t elaborate on how that would help.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I worked with HeLa cells as a molecular biology student. The ethics weren’t a great look, and I’m happy that today there has to be informed consent for stuff like that.
Without having an immortalized cell line like this genetics would have taken even longer to get going tho, and she’s actually one of the few people whose genes will be preserved for near eternity. Creepy, but it’s closer to actual immortality than any of us will ever be.
the_mighty_kracken@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That means every time that guy has masturbated in his life he was really jerking off his dead brother.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Hey now his brother has never been more alive.
rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I’m a data analyst at a medical nonprofit, primarily doing analyses on germline variants for rare forms of cancer. I’m new to this kind of work, but had a decent educational background in biology.
Something I’ve learned is that genetics are complicated as hell. A single gene can produce multiple different proteins, and proteins change over time due to somatic variation. Only 1% of the genome are protein coding, called exomes. Exomes can be affected by variations to start and stop codons, non coding regions, and untranslated regions. There are entire fields dedicated to studying genome-wide, exomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phenomics, and probably several others that I don’t know about. The amount of data involved with these fields is in the tebibytes region. Have you ever seen a “small” 3GiB csv? I have. The filtered and cleaned data frames created by genetics are over 100 columns wide and have nearly 5 million entries.
There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes. There’s a whole field of computer science dedicated to biological computing, using DNA as a storage medium. There are companies dedicated to simply classifying genes.
DNA is cool as hell.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes.
My dude, not a fun thing to think about who might have control over that. Is it a musk, zuck, cook or epstein?
rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
No, none of those guys are involved afaik. The one that made the first breakthrough in artificial life is ran by the same dude who competed with the Human Genome Project to map 99% of the human genome. They modified an extremely simple bacteria that only had something like 300 base pairs
MrEff@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If you really want to blow your mind, look into the theoretical alternatives to DNA. we are all taught about RNA and how it is a precursor to DNA, but what if it went another way? Look up PNA, PNA-O, or even GNA. If life existed on other worlds, there is a decent chance it follows an xNA structure, but not necessarily DNA.
ptu@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Interesting, could you enlighten what types if data is in those 100 columns? I’m aware of ATGC and thought it would be just one column, but maybe the rest are some that indicate intensity or activity. Or what sequence they are part of.
rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Well it varies depending on what the file is meant for. Usually there’s columns like chromosome, variant position, reference nucleotide, observed nucleotide, type of variation, codon sequence, gene name, etc.
There’s also columns that result from various analyses. In the file I’ve been working on lately, there are columns such as variant impact, level of confidence, pathogenicity, clinical significance, etc.
foofiepie@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I have no context/knowledge on topic. Are you saying DNA has that much data that can be extracted from it? If so, that’s nuts.
rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
yes, all that data is extrapolated directly from DNA. It’s a huge amount of information. All the DNA in a single human cell is directly translated to about 750MiB. Now, add in the fact that genomic studies use biobanks, like the UK Biobank, which contains the genetic info of hundreds of thousands of people. The data we can extrapolate from DNA is absolutely massive.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s too much science. We, as a people, need less sci- wait, no. No, no. Uh - We need bett-er? Science? Hmm.
Look just make it an animated cartoon with fun music for now and we’ll circle back.
heavy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
To add that the general understanding of how DNA works and is used can be scary, just like other measurements. I bet there’s still a lot of people that believe fingerprint analysis is some kind of rock solid science based evidence, but my understanding is that it’s very much prone to errors and interpretation.
I don’t mean to say that DNA analysis suffers the same flaws, just trying to illustrate with an example.
Windex007@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I hate the generalized concept of “AI”, but I love the concept of “Machine Learning”
If you think LLMs are good at anything, I am almost 100% certain to disagree with you about pretty much everything, to help you understand this distinction.
Anyhow, some computer scientists found that a machine learning algorithm could predict beyond a null hypothesis that A fingerprint belonged to a person given a different fingerprint.
“Criminology” expers were just like “no, it’s settled science”
This is the state of discourse.
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why do I even feel the compulsion to preface by saying my bit about ai and llms?
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how tf is “settled science” even a concept in a science
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I get a similar vibe from psychology. There’s a number of “experts” that are out in the field, doing the hard work day after day, putting in those hours… And hopelessly blinded by their own confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Clinical therapists in surveys prove very willing to overlook strong research in support of certain methods because they believe they see results in their clinical work that can’t be reproduced in a lab.
Then each field also has a research wing, slowly carving a path towards useful ideas, expending tremendous effort for each new finding, method, and result (even negative results!).
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
If you think LLMs are good at anything, I am almost 100% certain to disagree with you about pretty much everything, to help you understand this distinction.
Depends on what you mean by “anything.” The current obsession in the tech world of trying to shove LLMs into the AGI box? Yeah, not a good fit. Pure language stuff like translation or brainstorming? Very useful. LLMs now even surpass DeepL.
why do I even feel the compulsion to preface by saying my bit about ai and llms?
I have a similar compulsion to clarify that my interest in LLMs centers mainly around local open-source models that can run on consumer hardware.
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sudochown@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Same with bite mark analysis, polygraph, and bullet/gun rifling matching. CSI, Law and Order, etc. all have convinced people these things are just the pinnacle of evidence.
LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
At the end of the day, nothing is really beyond any doubt. Witnesses can imagine things, cops can be bribed, judges can have a newborn kid and maybe slept 3h last night
TheLazyNerd@europe.pub 2 weeks ago
There was a similar case of a woman who absorbed her twin brother in the womb. Only a small patch of cheek had her brothers DNA, but that is exactly where DNA is taken from when they want to take a DNA sample. This was discovered when she took a DNA test which came up as male.
saimen@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Why does this make DNA scary? I think it’s awesome that our understanding of DNA makes us able to unravel things like this.
bstix@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Imagine your dead twin using your penis to impregnate your wife with his DNA.
Alkali@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
“You may have defeated me in the womb brother, but impregnated your wife. I win”
saimen@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I get it. Chimerism is scary, but not DNA
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
I would say that he’s not really dead, his consciousness has taken shelter in some dark cranny of his mind, and slips out to cause trouble now and then.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s like if that carnie episode of X-Files had been on Cinemax at 3am
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Imagine you are le innocent wife, but your son does not have your father’s DNA
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
The child of a ghost who never got to exist
notwhoyouthink@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Something kinda romantic about that actually…it’s like he gets to live on genetically and be raised by his brother to be the person he was aways supposed to be.
MCTamTam@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I think they are saying this dude is so cuck that he is raising his wife and non-existent brothers son.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Biology is complicated. Never forget when you try to make an argument based on it.
PhoenixDog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
𝘣𝘜𝘵 𝘪𝘛’𝘚 𝘉𝘢𝘚𝘪𝘊 𝘉𝘪𝘖𝘭𝘖𝘨𝘠! is always said about how trans people can’t be trans.
I mean, 2+2 is just basic math but quantum physics is a little more complicated than basic math. Biology tends to get more complicated when you pass Grade 2.
chunes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As someone who has undergone extensive genetic testing, we’re still in the dark ages of medicine. We basically know nothing at all about jack.
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As someone with chronic issues, the amount of timed doctors just shrug and give up is kinda high.
Thats what I like House M.D. though, because it’s basically a Sherlock show, there’s always an answer. Unlike in real life, where they just send you home without actually figuring things out. I’ve had like 8 seizures in the last 10 years and still the best I’ve got it “idk, MRI seemed clear” and that’s all.
treesapx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The vast majority of what we do is just trying to get the body to a spot where it can manage the issue itself because we don’t have the means to do it ourselves.
Personalized medicine is the frontier that everyone has been trying to break into since the race to decode the human genome. What a lot of people don’t realize is that for every drug that goes to market there are thousands of promising candidates that are shelved due to a small population of adverse effects.
Now imagine what we can do if we can screen for those effects. Overnight the market would be flooded with powerful, effective medications with much fewer side effects. And that’s just medical drugs.
chunes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Personalized medicine is going to be much more of a political problem than a technical one, at least in my country. We have a hard enough time screening for things like cancer and diabetes.
Fredselfish@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The must of truly love that woman to keep getting tested. The average man would nope out once it came back kid wasn’t his.
JennyLaFae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
The last time I did a deep dive on the research, they estimated somewhere around 3% of the population had some form of chimerism, and I calculated my personal chances around 6%. And then I did some family research and anecdotal evidence pushed that number much higher, including being a single born twin.
One of the articles I recall postulated the number is much higher than 3% due to the condition only being confirmed or discovered through rare circumstances that result in multiple genetic testing.
Sunshine@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
Part 3 DIO be like.
87Six@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What the FUCK bro
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
dude: I want a divorce, your honor.
judge: on what grounds?
dude: on account that my wife fucked my dead brother and had a child with him.
judge: is this true?
woman: 1000003843
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Reminds me of when President Vic Michaelis asked Hank about DNA stuff
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Jerry Springer gonna come out of retirement for this one.
rethnor@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This is wild, and and important party of the plot for orphan black.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How does two genomes work together in one body without immune system going haywire?
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s what Cadmus wants you to think.
sanbdra@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Biology really said “plot twist” and rewrote the whole family tree. This is wild and fascinating at the same time.
NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
So I guess this means he ate every part of his brother except for the balls. Meaning he has 4 testicles knocking about in his scrotum, like a bag of shallots.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
Aren’t all women technically chimeras? Having two X genes means that 50% of the time one X is active and 50% of the time the other one is. And they tend to activate in stripes.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Chimerism is weird and it can do really weird shit to your body
Landless2029@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This reminds me of the law and order episode with twins where one was a rapist…
thagoat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
“Uncle”
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think there was a similar case, but about the mother. The courts took her baby and she was on trial for kidnapping.
Eventually a geneticists saw it on the news and suggested she got tested again using DNA samples from other parts of her body and they found out she also was a chimera.
Some racism was involved as she was working class and black, so the courts were just looking for a reason to take her baby and throw her ass in jail…
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Not surprised after reading the first paragraph
dkppunk@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I remember that one, it was the first time I heard of this scenario. It really sucks for folks involved, but it is kind of interesting too.
arschfidel@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Yes, it was the case of Lydia Fairchild From Wikipedia
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’d think they’d change DNA test methodologies so this sort of thing doesn’t happen again
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s rare enough for them not to give a fuck. especially since it’ll only hurt poor people who cant afford a genetic consultant