Could plant biology tell us anything useful about ME/CFS?

Sasha

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
The answer to this might be, 'No, don't be ridiculous,' but this is the latest in my random wonderings. Plants and animals have the same common genetic ancestor (thanks, Google), and both face immune challenges. I don't know how much their defence mechanisms have in common - maybe not much - but I wonder whether any scientists have ever looked to plant biology to try to solve human or animal medical problems, and whether it's likely to help us, even if it's just to let our minds jump onto a new track and consider approaches we haven't thought of before.

Or not!
 
Turns out I am not the only person to be wondering this!


It says:

MSU Foundation Professor Brad Day, in the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, is bridging the knowledge gap between the immune systems of plants and humans through better understanding the mechanisms by which plants fend off pathogens. [...]​
“We have identified several mechanisms in plant immunity that have known functions in human diseases,” he said. “We can use plants as a model to understand how these mechanisms function and how they've evolved. In doing that with plants, we can not only understand immunity, but we can also understand mechanisms that reach out into other neurological diseases. For example, a plant can tell us how the mechanism of Alzheimer’s may function, even though plants don't have neurosystems, some of those basic underlying chemical mechanisms are shared.”​
Day said plants also provide somewhat surprising opportunities to learn more about human immunity.​
“I think plants offer both technical and resource advantages that are sometimes obstacles in human research,” Day said. “For example, we can knock out many multiples of combinations of genes and study their function in plants.”​
“No longer are the days when we think we can knock out a single gene, and that is the magic bullet that underpins a disease. Diseases in humans are complex and are controlled by many genes and developmental states. In plants we can knock out multiple genes and expose plants to multiple environments to understand how those genes interact as a network in response to multiple stresses.​

I get the impression that this hasn't been looked at very much, and that things aren't very far forward, but the idea that you can experiment on plants in a way that wouldn't be ethical or possible in animals is interesting.
 
Maureen Hanson is a plant biologist.
Surprising!

From the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences:

Maureen R. Hanson is Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics. She received a B.S. degree at Duke University and a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Harvard University.​
After completing an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, she joined the faculty of the Biology Department at University of Virginia. She moved to Cornell as Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 1991.​
She is presently a member of the graduate Fields of Genetics and Development, Plant Biology, and Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology. She has previously served as Associate Director of the Cornell Biotechnology Program and Director of the Cornell Plant Science Center.​
She is currently Director for the Center for Enervating Neuroimmune Disease.​

I've never heard about any indication that the plant side has informed her ME/CFS work, though.
 
Plants have evolved to have many specific innate 'immune' defenses because they don't have legs and can't just walk away from infectious diseases! I'm not sure what we can learn from that though.

I'm not sure how valuable plant gene knock out studies given that genes tend to be involved in so many things, but it is fine for the very basic science.
 
The answer to this might be, 'No, don't be ridiculous,'
I admit that was my first thought. I think it's likely that ME's mechanism involves something that doesn't exist in plants (astrocytes, for example). It's not impossible for an understanding of plant biology to trigger an idea about mammalian biology. I think it's more likely that someday, someone might look back and find a useful similarity between ME's mechanism and some plant mechanism, but far too late to be helpful. for us.
 
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