Comments on: The Case of Hannah Poling Again

By: In Search of Another Hidden Horde, Autistic Children with Mito?

In Search of Another Hidden Horde, Autistic Children with Mito? — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:01:21 +0000

[...] the Federal government’s admission that vaccines had triggered autism in a little girl named Hannah Poling,” Kirby’s focus has become mitochondrial [...]

By: Last Week’s Top Posts

Last Week’s Top Posts — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:22:15 +0000

[...] The Case of Hannah Poling Again From the April 22 Scientific American: ““….. scientifically, from the documents presented in the vaccine court, the Polings did not make a case that deserved compensation.” [...]

By: S.L.

S.L. — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 23:03:25 +0000

I’m going to have to link to you again on my blog! I’ve got so much on mito, I have to add this too. I’m glad to hear Shoffner speaking out, I was hoping he would (& really wondered his perspective, having met him previously). I think this says it all:

“There is no precedent for that type of thinking and no data for that type of thinking,” Shoffner says.

Thanks for writing on this, I had missed this one!

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:29:42 +0000

In the absence of nitrifying bacteria, ammonia has no where to go and accumulates to toxic levels. It is virtually impossible to run an aquarium without nitrification going on without killing everything with ammonia build-up. I presume that would hold in soil too.

Nitrifiers are somewhat resistant to bleach. Salmonella is the usual bacteria of concern in turtles and they are more sensitive to bleach than are nitrifiers.

Embryonic turtles could accumulate ammonia as urea. But if a few eggs died, the ammonia from them could conceivably kill the whole nest.

By: Emily

Emily — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:53:15 +0000

We used heat-sterilized perlite or vermiculite, so no natural soil for our eggs. That’s not to say that they didn’t pick up bacteria on their way out–undoubtedly, they did. But I always noticed that there was a lot of bleach around at the commerical suppliers where we picked up our eggs. However, that said, we ourselves put a lot of ethanol on them–it was our solvent–and presumably, that would kill quite a few of the microbes. We also managed typically to get predicted sex ratios out of our eggs, based on whichever temperature we were using (e.g. 100% females at 31 C; 100% males at 26 C). It was rare to get anything outside of these predicted outcomes at the 100% extremes. The wild, of course, is completely different.

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:23:59 +0000

I wasn’t able to find a study where they had used sterilized substrate, but then I haven’t looked that carefully.

There have been no studies that looked specifically for these bacteria during egg incubation and I have found them on the surface of a turtle in a large enough concentration that NO level from the surface of the turtle was increased by spraying a NH4Cl solution on it. It would be difficult to avoid innoculation of the eggs while they are being laid.

In alligators, the nest is a big pile of stuff that actually heats up due to bacterial action. The environment the developing eggs are exposed to is a complex mix of temperatures, O2 levels, CO2 levels, humidity, and levels of bacterial metabolites.

Even if there is an effect of xenobiotics in sterile media, in “the wild”, there is no sterile media and the loss of these bacteria might be part of the variability in the results that have been reported. The bacteria have different susceptibility to different xenobiotic agents and that may relate to whole organism effects of xenobiotic agents.

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:34:00 +0000

Hi, Daedalus–

That would work, except that we get the same results with the contaminants using sterilized substrate, and our eggs are not laid in soil.

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:22:49 +0000

Actually I think that some of the endocrine disruption observed in wild animals due to xenobiotic chemicals in the environment may be due to disruption of natural biofilms of the bacteria I am working with. Many reptiles have their gender determined by the temperature at which their eggs incubate. The eggs are buried in the soil, where the bacteria I am working with are abundant, as the developing eggs release ammonia due to deamination of amino acids, where does the ammonia go? If it is oxidized by these bacteria, that will affect steroid metabolism.

If the bacteria are inhibited, by antibiotics, by nitrification inhibitors, by atrazine, by alkylbenzene sulfonate detergents (toxic to them at ppm levels), steroid physiology will be different in the developing reptile (or amphibian) eggs.

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:38:01 +0000

Daedalus, we’ve talked about your ideas, and I find them very interesting. If I hadn’t sworn off what I consider to be largely unnecessary research involving vertebrate animals, I’d probably be in there, poking around on this one.

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:36:09 +0000

It was one of Emily’s earlier papers that was instrumental in my formulation of my understanding that a change in the basal level of NO affects all NO mediated pathways with no threshold.

When a compound is used as a signaling control parameter, it is already in the “active range”. A change in the level changes the output of that control loop. Emily’s paper was about steroids and endocrine disruption, but the same concept holds for any signaling molecule.

As far as endocrine disruption goes, all steroids are metabolized by the cytochrome P450 enzymes which are regulated by NO. A change in the basal level of NO will affect the output of each pathway mediated by the cytochrome P450 enzymes, including steroid pathways.

A change in the basal NO level will cause endocrine disruption (not might, will). Physiology can’t compensate because it is the compensatory pathways themselves that are affected.