Prokaryote, Eukaryote. Lving Cells and Viruses

Anybody done with trusting scientists who for decades did not produce anything new in medicine? 500 billion a year payed by the US government in grants, for what? They give each other grades and honors, go to conferences, dress nicely, live the life but nothing has really progressed. All we got is theories that we believe are true. Some of them are and some, amazingly contradict or have never been harmonized to each other.

Last major discovery in medicine, antibiotics, has been done by chance. Good thing there was a guy who realized what happened in his Petri dish, when a fungus killed his cultures. That was 98 years ago. However political considerations did not allow mass production until after WWII. Imagine the number of lives that could have been saved during that war.

Vaccinations have has also been done way before modern medicine. At least in this book history of vaccination begins with 7th century India. But who can know for sure. Though i bet it started as an alchemical experiment (like curing fire with fire or whatever).

So here i go. I cannot afford the luxury to study first and write later because of lack of time and vastness of subjects. And because of that i usually start with an idea on a hunch and then run into something else. Like in the other post about lipid bilayer. Never finished the subject because i ran into the striking similarity between HIV and the so called COVID virus, the current scare. Something i did not expect. And then i started to suspect that like in seismology and other sciences, there might be massive lies and cover-ups and nothing solid under the glossy layer of publications and prizes and titles.

Most molecules, including water, are said to be... bipolar. Just kidding. They are just polar. Better said, asymmetrical. I mean, they can be bipolar but most of the times are multi-polar and sometimes even unipolar. Both electrical and mechanical. That is mass and electric charge is distributed spatially. At some ends charges are mostly positive and at some ends are negative. Same with weight. Water by example

Everybody knows if not from Paula Abdul song, the opposites attract, and for this reason only, in stationary water molecules arrange in matrix like structures. These intermolecular forces are rather weak. However they exist and play a very important role in everything we know. Most interesting at the separation between a liquid and a gas, they help create a membrane, because liquid molecules cling to each other (each end to other's opposite end). Capilarity. The reason textile fibers "get wet". For this reason in (absence of gravity) the drops of water are round or even exist. Some substances repel water. It is said they are hydrophobes. Water does not mix with oil, etc..

And here i am. Oil. What is oil made of. Fatty acids are not polar and for that reason they do not mix with water like it is said even in the Bible.

Phospholipids are fatty acids at one end and a phosphate group at the other. The are polar but only at one end (does this make sense to anyone) and still do not mix with water. Their phosphate heads would want to dissolve in water however their fatty tails do not. So they cling to each other forming a natural bilayer.

No matter what. If you throw some phospholipids (by the chemical formula above) in the water, you'll get a bilayer. For some reason that is within the same terms above, the phospolipids bilayers in water close in spheres like water drops in air though empty inside. Chemists call those micelles.

So from the beginning we had bipolarity, phobia, attraction and as we'll see later, some cannibalism. I can see now how confusing is for scientists to deal with all these.

It's no secret by now. All living things are made of these. It's also how it all started. Bilayers.

Everywhere i went to read about, it's a big dilemma. I mean, nowadays we have lipids, fatty acids, everywhere because they are synthesized by the living cells. Back then? Where they came from? To form the first micelle that is. That in billions of years got populated with DNA, ribosomes, all the good things that make a true cell which can divide and multiply.

In the beginning or 4 billion years ago they were only prokariotes. I bet it's a greek word. Nevermind that. Then it came eukariotes, 2 billions later. In the early 90s the old prokariotes were separated in two groups. Bacteria and archaea. These are the oldest living things on earth. They can be only unicellular. That is they do not combine with other of their kind to make an organism. And then, 2 billion years ago a bacteria ate another of its kind and did not digest it but the prey became the first nucleus of an newly created cell. The first eukariote. Or so they say.

And since we have such a neat distinction between the only two existing types of living cells, we can study them by comparison.

First. Eukariotes have a nucleus to keep their DNA togehter (DNA inside nucleus on left, the only thing not shown in this picture. Also not named the detailed components of the membrane and the peptidoglycan strata on the right).

Eukaryotes are much more evolved. They have by example mitochondria, an organelle that produces energy for the rest of the cell. Ribosome for synthesizing proteins. (Though a bit confusing. What do they mean by orders?) A bunch of other stuff. They evolved to make the multicelullar organisms we know today as plants or animals. But they can't live by themselves. That is they need to be fed with nutrients, oxygen and get rid of waste products, like carbon dioxide, urea, name it. However, they have the original bilayer while the prokariotes have more strata of membranes. That is because the prokariotes, or todays bacteria, live by themselves while the eukariotes within an extracellular matrix. Be it of cellulose, like in plants, or collagen like in animals. In the picture, plant cells in their cellulose matrix, from the same article in Live Science.
Viruses. Viruses are not living things. That is they cannot reproduce or perform any cell's function. They just sit there and wait to get inside a cell where they can make copies of themselves and in the process destroying that cell and that's it. They have though the same bilayer membrane of the eukariotes cells. Otherwise they could not merge with them, to implant their RNA inside the infected cell, from where many copies of the virus will emerge, probably using pieces of the bilayer of the host cell in the final assembly.

Never heard of a virus attacking a bacteria, because they have a much thicker membrane. What do you know... They have special viruses which are encapsulated in protein that can attack bacteria.

Since i mentioned penicillin. I think heard it before, wanted to see it one more time. Penicillin bursts bacteria's wall. That is the peptidoglycans part of the more structured bacterial (prokaryotes) wall. That BTW includes a bylipid component. It is understood. If you destroy the peptidoglycans, bylipid doesn't even matter. The bacteria cannot survive. Because it does not live inside the Extra Cellular Matrix. The reason penicillin does not kill all the cells in your body is because they don't have a peptidoglycan cell wall.  What?

Question. How the  coronavirus with its fragile bilayer only as membrane gets through the ECM (Ectra Celullar Matrix) to reach inside an eukariote cell?

There is only one answer to this. Only if the ECM is damaged exposing the cells. However, if this would happen the cells without the strong membrane of an autonomous prokaryote, would immediately fall apart. Or maybe the eukariote falls from its matrix inside blood stream and it's only there the virus attacks.

Got a bit tired. Need to re-read and continue.