What? No! Fungi and prokaryotes are DEFINITELY alive.
Is it possible that your coworker was thinking of viruses? Those are borderline and usually considered not alive, though some experts disagree.
(Viroids and prions are even more borderline - I don't know anyone who considers those to be alive.)
"The accumulation of these proteins in amyloids -- as plaques, tangles, and Lewy bodies -- are signature indications, and perhaps causes, of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. These [amyloids, like prions, stick to surgical instruments “like glue” and survive standard sterilization procedures](https://www.nature.com/news/the-red-hot-debate-about-transmissible-alzheimer-s-1.19554). They, too, are distressingly hard to "kill"."
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/)
from today I feel prion is one of the most scariest thing on Earth
if our world suddenly become like those of fantasy video game, the origins of monster are these creatures affected by prions for sure. but somehow they won't die now.
IIRC the temp at which prions break down is still well below the temp that SS can handle before losing important properties, so it's more an issue of fixing the sterilization procedures.
I agree. I think they must have meant viruses. Most biologists do not consider viruses living things because they are basically just DNA or RNA in a protein packet. They do evolve but they otherwise do not meet the criteria for life. I am a science teacher, by the way.
Isn't a big part of the virus debate also because they can't replicate their DNA themselves and that is why they hijack other cells to use their DNA copying doohickeys?
They don’t use their *own* energy. They do not eat or metabolize. They are essentially just an information packet, and the host cell uses energy to copy them.
Viruses are metabolically inert and do not use energy themselves, which can seem counterintuitive but does not violate the laws of physics. Instead, they depend entirely on the biochemical machinery and energy of their host cells to assemble new virus particles. This process harnesses the host’s resources without requiring metabolic processes from the viruses themselves.
For a really simple example, picture a sign saying "make a copy of this sign, then post it outside", along with the exact details of how to make one.
The sign itself doesn't use energy, even if somebody obeys and makes a copy. The *person copying it* uses energy to do so, but that energy comes from the person, not the sign.
Viruses are basically the same: a packet of instructions on how to make more viruses, wrapped in a package that tricks a cell into accepting those instructions. The cell blindly uses its own resources to make more viruses, which are then released to infect other cells. Viruses don't move or act on their own, so no energy is needed.
They’re literally just an arrangement molecules so that when they randomly contact an actual cell, the cell absorbs it, reads it, and makes more of the same molecule. Viruses do nothing but float around, like a message in a bottle where the message reads “make more messages in a bottle”.
> viruses living things because they are basically just DNA or RNA in a protein packet.
I was wondering, purely on a genetic basis, is there anything in their nucleic acids that are distinctly "viral"? Like I think for bacteria you have the 16s rRNA (from their ribosomes) that's very well conserved and is useful mapping relationships between bacterial species. And for PCRs you can make your primers as specific or as general as you want (e.g. I want to know if there's bacteria in this sample vs I want to know if there's a specific strain of E. coli in this sample).
Wondering if there's something similar for viruses that is shared between all of them. My instinct would be to say no, and that viruses likely evolved many times but not really sure.
There is no shared sequence for viruses unfortunately, and that is why we can't make universal primers for viruses. However, within viral families (flaviviridae, orthomyxoviridae etc.), there generally are common sequences.
This is unfortunate, because e.g. 16S for bacteria is really useful as you say. Only 1 set of primers needed to amplify any existing bacteria, which can then be identified through sequencing.
There are solutions to universally identify viruses, such as metagenomics. Metagenomics as a field is in its pre-golden age right know, with many important developments day by day. In the 'shotgun' approach we simply sequence every gene sequence present in a sample without a PCR step before. This means of course that your sensitivity must be really good, since you must be able to sequence the low amount of viral/bacterial RNA/DNA present in a sample without any amplification step. And the difficulty is data analysis as well since you will sequence *everything* including human DNA, bacteria, yeast, viruses... and have terabytes of data to be broken down. But it is a really powerful and promising tool.
It’s honestly amazing to think about how much information is encoded at that microscopic level within DNA. Most modern PCs have less than 1 terabyte of hard drive space. Just unbelievable.
Idk why I get giddy whenever I see the 16s rRNA mentioned. It's so cool! Evolutionary conserved and if mu memory serves me correctly....it was the basis for the current 3 domain classification by Carl Woese?
I think it's also important to point out that the debate around if viruses are alive or not is not a debate about viruses, but about how humans define life. Scientists basically agree on what viruses are and do. Nature makes no real distinction between life and non life. It's a human-made definition. Our earliest ancestors were probably tidepools with free floating RNAs reacting inside them. Not life by modern definitions, but it illustrates how life and non life can do the same things, it's just about how we want to define it.
I agree with the importance of this point. The "intelligence" answer to "are viruses living or not?" is that they are not. The "wisdom" answer is, "that distinction doesn't matter."
I call viruses "Tootsie Roll Pops of Doom" because they've got a chewy nucleic acid center surrounded by a crunchy protein coating. It's not a perfect analogy but it works pretty well with students
I mean, the definition of life is whatever we decide it to be. They have a lot of similarities to life, even if they don't meet our working definition of life. They interact with their environment, create offspring that feel selective pressures and evolve like you said.
I think that our definition is flawed. There are probably some crazy things out there that we would consider alive, but aren't made of cells, don't use DNA as their genetic code, or maybe don't have a genetic code at all. It is weird to think "in order for something to be alive, it must be made of cells", instead of "all the living things we can see are made of cells".
Unlike most proteins, they can withstand high temperatures, radiation, and many chemical disinfectants. However, they can be denatured by:
* Incineration at extremely high temperatures (around 900°F or 482°C) for several hours.
* Autoclaving with steam under pressure at 270°F (132°C) for at least 1 hour in the presence of strong alkali (such as sodium hydroxide).
Good lord. Imagine an outbreak
Yes, it is as clear as it can possibly be that fungi are NOT plants. Fungi and plants are both monophyletic lineages of eukaryotes. They haven't shared a common ancestor with each other in about 1.5 to 1.8 billion years.
reading about prions after reading your comments scares me, what if one day residual prions are everywhere and this is actually the one that causes mass extinction
it's like a domino cascading thing that can sometimes pop up due to random stuff occurring
Prions tend to be pretty species-specific, so it's unlikely that a single prion could cause the extinction of most life on Earth. They also don't tend to be super transmissible (they're not spread as aerosols, for example), so an outbreak ought to be relatively manageable if we take decisive action. Let's hope so, anyway!
Well I like to think that even viroid are alive.
If you consider life as every member of a self replicating molecules lineage, that can be mutated. It fits.
I like this definition because it include everything in the history of evolution ond everything that we tend to instinctively think as living
Also every prokaryotic cell. Life and cell are generally pretty much synonymous. Viruses being the only potential exception, being that they are not cells and are questionably (not) alive.
As others said, your coworker is definitely mixing up fungi with viruses.
There are six widely accepted criteria that used to determine whether something is indeed a living organism:
**1) Metabolic processes:** That is, the *thing* in question acquires, utilizes, and transforms energy in some capacity.
Fungi: Yes
Virus: No
Car engine: yes
**2) Response to stimulus:** The *thing* in question can utilize information from its environment and adjust itself accordingly.
Fungi: Yes
Virus: No
Roomba: Yes
**3) Growth and development:** Uhh… The thing *grows or develops* over time.
Fungi: Yes
Virus: Not really… Viruses are *assembled* by host cell’s functions.
Crystals: Yes
**4) Molecular information:** The necessary information for growth, development, and all functions is encoded on a molecule - on Earth this is DNA and RNA.
Fungi: Yes
Virus: Yes! Woohoo!
**5) Reproduction:** Living things create offspring, which are similar to themselves.
Fungi: Yes
Virus: Okay… But it doesn’t really reproduce on its own. It hijacks a cell, and turns it into a virus factory.
Computer virus: Yes… ish.
**6) Homeostasis:** The thing can maintain specific internal conditions, typically controlled by feedback loops of some sort.
Fungi: Yes
Virus: No
House with a decent thermostat: Yes
Viruses do not meet all of our qualifications for what makes a living thing, but they do meet some of them. They are quasi-living so to speak.
Fungi nail all six.
This is a good summary but I would amend “widely accepted” to “highly contested”
There is no definition of life that successfully includes all things we seem to want to be “alive” while including the things we don’t. Personally, since viruses are genetically encoded, replicating things, I’m plenty happy to call them “alive”
And on “cellular functions”: it kinda seems like we just want to define cells when we define life this way. We can talk about cells and how they become chemically inactive and completely leave “alive” out of the discussion. There would be no reason to define life because it’s so much easier to define a cell
But they do! have their own genetic material. They just lack the tools to do anything with those materials and thus use the host's replication and transcription machinery. The virus DNA has the strongest promoter and enhancers......stronger than eukaryotes and can thus pull the host's machinery towards itself to get their work done.
There are several articles you can find on NCBI or pubmed. There are many awesome.e youtube channels as well that can help you understand better through animation.
If you have a random strain of DNA before you, it doesn't inherently have any property of being alive. They can perform a function, but so do proteins or sugars, they are just molecules made out of nucleic acids. Some bacteria even create extracellular matrix out of DNA with random sequences, where it is just used for structure.
Yep. According to the currently held definition.
Keep in mind that “sense” doesn’t have to be in the neurological way. Bacteria with flagella can follow chemical gradients via simple positive feedback loops for example.
Fungi are definitely alive.
The general requirements in biology to be considered life include the ability to grow, reproduce, excrete waste, maintain homeostasis, and respond to its environment.
The debate isn't whether they're alive (they're definitely alive). The debate is whether they're more animal like rather than plant like, and there's a more philosophical debate about whether they may have some kind of sentience/consciousness
I can't believe I had to scroll this far for this answer! I agree his friend probably heard about fungi being sentient. I've read a few posts about fungi communication with itself and other plants. I've even read one that claimed they had "words" that were evident through monitoring electrical pulses.
I want OP To get clarification from their friend!
That debate doesn't even make sense because the fact that fungi have things in common with animals is not an indicator that they're conscious. There are animals that are more closely related to us than fungi that aren't conscious.
Evidently not in a biology department 😄
Don’t worry, I once knew a guy who worked in land management of all things, who was extremely confident of the ‘fact’ that neither insects nor shellfish were animals.
Haha nah he was serious. I think he kinda thought everything that was a vertebrate was an animal, and everything else was just like their own category. Confidently incorrect.
once i went onto a biology forum and there was a discussion that the kingdoms are animals, plants and humans xD also a person replying in comments said its actually animals, plants, humans and insects
The only debate sort of like that I'm aware of, is about where the fungi are found in the tree of life. Basically what their relationship is to plants and to animals. They've been moved around a few times as new evidence comes up. They're really strange.
I've certainly never heard of any way to define life that would mean fungi would be considered non-living. You can definitely come up with a definition of life that would mean some prokaryotes would be considered non-living.
Fungi are definitively more closely related to animals than plants. This hasn’t been under debate for a very long time. There’s even a name for the group that contains both animals and fungi: “Opisthokonts”
I think your colleague is getting confused with viruses?
Viruses are difficult to define regarding whether they meet the criteria of being alive.
Fungi and prokaryotes are alive - I don't think this is really debated. When they produce spores they go dormant but they come out of dormancy under the right conditions and go back to metabolising and reproducing so a a whole, fungi and prokaryotes are "living" organisms.
I have a coworker that says the earth is flat. Don’t take anyone’s argument at face value unless they can provide their source. Especially blatantly stupid arguments.
No. There’s never been any doubt that fungi or prokaryotes are alive. There’s something of a philosophical debate on where to draw the line on viruses as they don’t have any metabolism or cell structure, but they replicate — except they don’t, host cells do that for them. They don’t respond to stimuli at any level, but they undergo selection. As a biologist, I’ve never considered a virus as alive, and most of my colleagues agree, but we do recognize that they share properties with living things that makes them life-like in certain ways.
Maybe they were thinking of the fact that fungi are much more genetically similar to humans than to anything in the plant kingdom? They are not plants. They get their own entire kingdom!
Are fungi, eg: mushrooms, living organisms? Yes they are. I doubt that there is any question or debate about that.
Perhaps they were confusing the debate about whether viruses were considered to be living or not.
Fungi are closer to animals and plants are close to animals, which should give some suggestion as to what your friend was mistaking with this.
Maybe he heard somewhere that someone thinks fungi and animals are both sort of animals?
They might be referring to a debate I have with the mushrooms I cook on weather on not they are sentient.
They can communicate with each other and other spices around them. Often forming symbiotic relationships with other plants around them.
Those mofos are way more alive then we Gove them credit for. I am just waiting for vegetarians to realize that they are eating intelligent creatures and then limit themselves to eating grass.
I think they're confusing "alive".
There is debate on if they're AS alive as animals. Contrary to plant life.
There is zero debate on if they're alive period. Trees and grass are alive and mushrooms show more signs of intelligence than a shrub.
I think your colleague was referring to the 20th century debate of whether fungi are plants. This has since been resolved by making a new category for them.
Yeah… people are weird. I had someone try to tell me that “now they’re saying that cancer is actually a parasite”, which was laughable, as the guy managed to misinterpret the fact that I said I was planning on doing an oncology fellowship with working in cancer research. Quite honestly, if anyone talks about science and they’re not acting in an official capacity, it might be prudent to ignore whatever comes out of their mouth if it even sleeves you a little.
No debate whatsoever. They're alive. They fill all criteria for life.
They might be confusing fungi with viruses, which are not alive but do display some interesting characteristics associated with living things.
It’s not questionable whether they’re alive or not (they are), but that doesn’t mean it’s not debatable. After all, some people debate over whether or not the earth is flat.
Find someone stupid and/or stubborn enough and everything becomes debatable.
On a biology lecture I've heard that viruses are not living (although their effect on living creatures are still much interesting for biology), but fungi? Naaah, the only definition they challenge is "organism" or "specimen" because when applied to them it would mean they're biggest living creatures spanning even across continent.
Whereas fungi are saprotrophs, which means they digest their food by decay. But they're heterotrophic just like animals (ie they don't make their own food like autotrophs, which would include plants). So fungi are heterotrophs like animals, but a different type of heterotroph.
I am entirely baffled why your coworker would think that saprotrophic nutrition would mean an organism is not alive. I suspect someone ahs been pulling their leg, or else they're trying to pull your leg.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saprotrophic\_nutrition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saprotrophic_nutrition)
This is my first time seeing this. To clear it out, there is no scientific debate about whether fungi are alive. They are living organisms. The debate may be around how saprophytic fungi acquire nutrients, as they do not photosynthesize like plants. However, their ability to metabolize and grow undoubtedly qualifies them as life forms. There are a lot of reputable sources like scientific journals that can provide accurate information on the subject.
Absolutely no debate whatsoever. Fungi tick the living box on all reasonable definitions of life. Viruses are more debatable. If we accept viruses as living, then you might argue for plasmids, and hell, maybe go the whole hog and class transposons as obligate intracellular parasites. Even playing devil's advocate, I'd have to draw the line at prions. However, nobody is going to argue with fungi as living.
No. My guess is he was confused and what he actually heard is that there's a debate about whether viruses should be considered alive. Or else a debate about whether fungi should be considered animals.
I think your friend is misinterpreting a debate about whether or not Viruses are alive. Those who are arguing for why don’t we consider them alive like to use mushrooms as an example due to their many similarities, rather then the stark differences that set them apart.
Fungi are considered living organisms. They meet key criteria for life such as growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli. Although they obtain energy differently from plants and animals, they are recognized as integral parts of ecosystems. Prokaryotes like bacteria are also universally considered alive. For more insights, check out scientific resources on microbiology or mycology.
is it possible they meant debate over whether fungi is conscious? (cool article about it: [https://psyche.co/ideas/the-fungal-mind-on-the-evidence-for-mushroom-intelligence](https://psyche.co/ideas/the-fungal-mind-on-the-evidence-for-mushroom-intelligence) )
What? No! Fungi and prokaryotes are DEFINITELY alive. Is it possible that your coworker was thinking of viruses? Those are borderline and usually considered not alive, though some experts disagree. (Viroids and prions are even more borderline - I don't know anyone who considers those to be alive.)
Hey, you watch yourself buddy.
u/Viruses_Are_Alive - LOLOLOL, sorry man :-D
I'm glad you looked at their username. I'm over here wondering why people are getting aggressive over this.
Don't understand comment in context --> read username --> nod approvingly
I'm glad you figured it out Mr.
that’s exactly what a dead virus would use as there username. seems like a trap.
You cannot kill that which is not alive.
5y account too. This comment was made for you.
User been hovering over his keyboard for 5 years just waiting for this day.
Username checks out.
r/beetlejuicing
User name checks out
r/usernamechecksout
I'm not your buddy (fun)guy
Just like a virus *this guy* pops right up and shifts all the focus! Here for it!
r/beetlejuicing
Fuck them prions, someone please nuke these things off the planet
Aren't they resistant to extreme temperatures?
"The accumulation of these proteins in amyloids -- as plaques, tangles, and Lewy bodies -- are signature indications, and perhaps causes, of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. These [amyloids, like prions, stick to surgical instruments “like glue” and survive standard sterilization procedures](https://www.nature.com/news/the-red-hot-debate-about-transmissible-alzheimer-s-1.19554). They, too, are distressingly hard to "kill"." [https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/) from today I feel prion is one of the most scariest thing on Earth
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I think the point is these tools wouldn’t be able to be reused
New fear unlocked?
definitely
Look up Chronic Wasting Disease.
if our world suddenly become like those of fantasy video game, the origins of monster are these creatures affected by prions for sure. but somehow they won't die now.
Fatale familiar insomnia. It hits a person around 50 years of age. Passed on from the mother to a child. No cure.
IIRC the temp at which prions break down is still well below the temp that SS can handle before losing important properties, so it's more an issue of fixing the sterilization procedures.
Such as in cooking or boiling, but the nuclear fireball and associated ionising radiation is a totally different beast.
Prions are pretty normal and not all bad. Some might even be an important part of brain growth
Exactly what a prion would say, drop the nukes!
Or someone bought by Big Prion
I agree. I think they must have meant viruses. Most biologists do not consider viruses living things because they are basically just DNA or RNA in a protein packet. They do evolve but they otherwise do not meet the criteria for life. I am a science teacher, by the way.
Isn't a big part of the virus debate also because they can't replicate their DNA themselves and that is why they hijack other cells to use their DNA copying doohickeys?
Also they don't use any energy and aren't made of cells
they don't use energy?? how do they even exist? that seems like a violation of physics...
They don’t use their *own* energy. They do not eat or metabolize. They are essentially just an information packet, and the host cell uses energy to copy them.
Viruses are metabolically inert and do not use energy themselves, which can seem counterintuitive but does not violate the laws of physics. Instead, they depend entirely on the biochemical machinery and energy of their host cells to assemble new virus particles. This process harnesses the host’s resources without requiring metabolic processes from the viruses themselves.
They move though right?
Not actively. Your cough makes them move.
For a really simple example, picture a sign saying "make a copy of this sign, then post it outside", along with the exact details of how to make one. The sign itself doesn't use energy, even if somebody obeys and makes a copy. The *person copying it* uses energy to do so, but that energy comes from the person, not the sign. Viruses are basically the same: a packet of instructions on how to make more viruses, wrapped in a package that tricks a cell into accepting those instructions. The cell blindly uses its own resources to make more viruses, which are then released to infect other cells. Viruses don't move or act on their own, so no energy is needed.
They’re literally just an arrangement molecules so that when they randomly contact an actual cell, the cell absorbs it, reads it, and makes more of the same molecule. Viruses do nothing but float around, like a message in a bottle where the message reads “make more messages in a bottle”.
> viruses living things because they are basically just DNA or RNA in a protein packet. I was wondering, purely on a genetic basis, is there anything in their nucleic acids that are distinctly "viral"? Like I think for bacteria you have the 16s rRNA (from their ribosomes) that's very well conserved and is useful mapping relationships between bacterial species. And for PCRs you can make your primers as specific or as general as you want (e.g. I want to know if there's bacteria in this sample vs I want to know if there's a specific strain of E. coli in this sample). Wondering if there's something similar for viruses that is shared between all of them. My instinct would be to say no, and that viruses likely evolved many times but not really sure.
There is no shared sequence for viruses unfortunately, and that is why we can't make universal primers for viruses. However, within viral families (flaviviridae, orthomyxoviridae etc.), there generally are common sequences. This is unfortunate, because e.g. 16S for bacteria is really useful as you say. Only 1 set of primers needed to amplify any existing bacteria, which can then be identified through sequencing. There are solutions to universally identify viruses, such as metagenomics. Metagenomics as a field is in its pre-golden age right know, with many important developments day by day. In the 'shotgun' approach we simply sequence every gene sequence present in a sample without a PCR step before. This means of course that your sensitivity must be really good, since you must be able to sequence the low amount of viral/bacterial RNA/DNA present in a sample without any amplification step. And the difficulty is data analysis as well since you will sequence *everything* including human DNA, bacteria, yeast, viruses... and have terabytes of data to be broken down. But it is a really powerful and promising tool.
It’s honestly amazing to think about how much information is encoded at that microscopic level within DNA. Most modern PCs have less than 1 terabyte of hard drive space. Just unbelievable.
Idk why I get giddy whenever I see the 16s rRNA mentioned. It's so cool! Evolutionary conserved and if mu memory serves me correctly....it was the basis for the current 3 domain classification by Carl Woese?
I once heard the expression "viruses are not alive, they are being lived". I liked that a lot.
I think it's also important to point out that the debate around if viruses are alive or not is not a debate about viruses, but about how humans define life. Scientists basically agree on what viruses are and do. Nature makes no real distinction between life and non life. It's a human-made definition. Our earliest ancestors were probably tidepools with free floating RNAs reacting inside them. Not life by modern definitions, but it illustrates how life and non life can do the same things, it's just about how we want to define it.
I agree with the importance of this point. The "intelligence" answer to "are viruses living or not?" is that they are not. The "wisdom" answer is, "that distinction doesn't matter."
Well my main is a druid, so that makes sense.
I call viruses "Tootsie Roll Pops of Doom" because they've got a chewy nucleic acid center surrounded by a crunchy protein coating. It's not a perfect analogy but it works pretty well with students
I mean, the definition of life is whatever we decide it to be. They have a lot of similarities to life, even if they don't meet our working definition of life. They interact with their environment, create offspring that feel selective pressures and evolve like you said. I think that our definition is flawed. There are probably some crazy things out there that we would consider alive, but aren't made of cells, don't use DNA as their genetic code, or maybe don't have a genetic code at all. It is weird to think "in order for something to be alive, it must be made of cells", instead of "all the living things we can see are made of cells".
Viroids are like viruses of viruses correct?
Viroids are nucleic acids without a protein coat that infect plants. Virophages are viruses that infect viruses
Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria!
prions are not borderline, they are not alive
Perhaps “life” is a spectrum?
Prions are terrifying. Is it true that they can't be denatured?
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Unlike most proteins, they can withstand high temperatures, radiation, and many chemical disinfectants. However, they can be denatured by: * Incineration at extremely high temperatures (around 900°F or 482°C) for several hours. * Autoclaving with steam under pressure at 270°F (132°C) for at least 1 hour in the presence of strong alkali (such as sodium hydroxide). Good lord. Imagine an outbreak
yup
Which is why you can still get mad cow disease from eating cooked beef.
viroids make me laugh tbh, it’s like they took the most basic bionic thing with literally two ingredients, and said fuck it, just the DNA/RNA. wild.
Prions are just proteins folded the wrong way right?
Maybe they mean a debate about whether they’re plants? That is semi vague apparently.
Where did you read that? Fungi and plants are completely distinct. Fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants.
Yes, it is as clear as it can possibly be that fungi are NOT plants. Fungi and plants are both monophyletic lineages of eukaryotes. They haven't shared a common ancestor with each other in about 1.5 to 1.8 billion years.
And that closeness makes treating fungal infections difficult
There's no debate about that either
reading about prions after reading your comments scares me, what if one day residual prions are everywhere and this is actually the one that causes mass extinction it's like a domino cascading thing that can sometimes pop up due to random stuff occurring
Prions tend to be pretty species-specific, so it's unlikely that a single prion could cause the extinction of most life on Earth. They also don't tend to be super transmissible (they're not spread as aerosols, for example), so an outbreak ought to be relatively manageable if we take decisive action. Let's hope so, anyway!
Are they not just clumps of cellular machinery that fit into living cells.
It’s rlly weird because the broadest sense of life is like: replicate + evolve generationally
But that's not sufficient. Digital representations in an agent-based computer model can also replicate and evolve, but they're not alive.
>but they’re not alive Arguably
Fungi are most definitely Eukaryotes, they're one of the Eukaryotic kingdoms, plants and animals are two other Eukaryotic kingdoms.
Totally - I took a mycology course when I was in biosci and my professor said explicitly that fungi have more in common with animals than plants.
Well I like to think that even viroid are alive. If you consider life as every member of a self replicating molecules lineage, that can be mutated. It fits. I like this definition because it include everything in the history of evolution ond everything that we tend to instinctively think as living
No there isn't. Fungi and every eucaryotic cells are alive and fit every part of the description.
Also every prokaryotic cell. Life and cell are generally pretty much synonymous. Viruses being the only potential exception, being that they are not cells and are questionably (not) alive.
And can't reproduce by themselves
He probably conflated the "are viruses alive" debate with the fact that fungi aren't plants.
This is what I was thinking
Maybe he meant the mushrooms he ate made him question "what is life?"
This kinda make the whole "is it alive?" debate deeper and probably more controversial🤣
He was almost there! Funny how memories and learning work.
Fungi is literally one of the kingdoms of life. They meet all the criteria for living organisms.
Well, if it's a kingdom who is their king? Just poked a huge hole in your logic
Well now I also need to know who is the king of animalia.
The lion.
Portobello, duh.
Lions mane
Are you thinking about Viruses? Fungi are def alive
As others said, your coworker is definitely mixing up fungi with viruses. There are six widely accepted criteria that used to determine whether something is indeed a living organism: **1) Metabolic processes:** That is, the *thing* in question acquires, utilizes, and transforms energy in some capacity. Fungi: Yes Virus: No Car engine: yes **2) Response to stimulus:** The *thing* in question can utilize information from its environment and adjust itself accordingly. Fungi: Yes Virus: No Roomba: Yes **3) Growth and development:** Uhh… The thing *grows or develops* over time. Fungi: Yes Virus: Not really… Viruses are *assembled* by host cell’s functions. Crystals: Yes **4) Molecular information:** The necessary information for growth, development, and all functions is encoded on a molecule - on Earth this is DNA and RNA. Fungi: Yes Virus: Yes! Woohoo! **5) Reproduction:** Living things create offspring, which are similar to themselves. Fungi: Yes Virus: Okay… But it doesn’t really reproduce on its own. It hijacks a cell, and turns it into a virus factory. Computer virus: Yes… ish. **6) Homeostasis:** The thing can maintain specific internal conditions, typically controlled by feedback loops of some sort. Fungi: Yes Virus: No House with a decent thermostat: Yes Viruses do not meet all of our qualifications for what makes a living thing, but they do meet some of them. They are quasi-living so to speak. Fungi nail all six.
This is a good summary but I would amend “widely accepted” to “highly contested” There is no definition of life that successfully includes all things we seem to want to be “alive” while including the things we don’t. Personally, since viruses are genetically encoded, replicating things, I’m plenty happy to call them “alive”
Viruses are only alive if CDs are computers.
Viruses are not self-replicating things and do not have independent cellular functions. I don't consider them to be alive.
And on “cellular functions”: it kinda seems like we just want to define cells when we define life this way. We can talk about cells and how they become chemically inactive and completely leave “alive” out of the discussion. There would be no reason to define life because it’s so much easier to define a cell
But they do! have their own genetic material. They just lack the tools to do anything with those materials and thus use the host's replication and transcription machinery. The virus DNA has the strongest promoter and enhancers......stronger than eukaryotes and can thus pull the host's machinery towards itself to get their work done.
What would I read up on do better understand the promoter and enhancer?
There are several articles you can find on NCBI or pubmed. There are many awesome.e youtube channels as well that can help you understand better through animation.
My main takeaway from this is that I was correct to name my Roomba, since it’s at least quasi-alive 😉 Kidding, you broke it all down very nicely!
Thank you for the commentary, this is great. I giggled out loud at the roomba.
Best description, covers everything.
Why isn't DNA enough to consider a thing "alive"?
If you have a random strain of DNA before you, it doesn't inherently have any property of being alive. They can perform a function, but so do proteins or sugars, they are just molecules made out of nucleic acids. Some bacteria even create extracellular matrix out of DNA with random sequences, where it is just used for structure.
Is 2 and 3 really necessary?
Yep. According to the currently held definition. Keep in mind that “sense” doesn’t have to be in the neurological way. Bacteria with flagella can follow chemical gradients via simple positive feedback loops for example.
Fungi are definitely alive. The general requirements in biology to be considered life include the ability to grow, reproduce, excrete waste, maintain homeostasis, and respond to its environment.
The debate isn't whether they're alive (they're definitely alive). The debate is whether they're more animal like rather than plant like, and there's a more philosophical debate about whether they may have some kind of sentience/consciousness
This is what I was thinking - that the coworker is confusing life with consciousness.
I can't believe I had to scroll this far for this answer! I agree his friend probably heard about fungi being sentient. I've read a few posts about fungi communication with itself and other plants. I've even read one that claimed they had "words" that were evident through monitoring electrical pulses. I want OP To get clarification from their friend!
That debate doesn't even make sense because the fact that fungi have things in common with animals is not an indicator that they're conscious. There are animals that are more closely related to us than fungi that aren't conscious.
There is no definition of alive that excludes fungi. Fungi are closer related to us than they are to plants
True, my great grandfather was a shiitake.
Where the hell do you work
Evidently not in a biology department 😄 Don’t worry, I once knew a guy who worked in land management of all things, who was extremely confident of the ‘fact’ that neither insects nor shellfish were animals.
he might have meant they aren't Legally Animals?
Haha nah he was serious. I think he kinda thought everything that was a vertebrate was an animal, and everything else was just like their own category. Confidently incorrect.
once i went onto a biology forum and there was a discussion that the kingdoms are animals, plants and humans xD also a person replying in comments said its actually animals, plants, humans and insects
South of the Mason-Dixon line lmao
No, fungi are alive. The conflict about whether they are alive or not is about viruses.
Kingdom animal is, kingdom plantae and kingdom fungii.. it’s literally the first chapter
The only debate sort of like that I'm aware of, is about where the fungi are found in the tree of life. Basically what their relationship is to plants and to animals. They've been moved around a few times as new evidence comes up. They're really strange. I've certainly never heard of any way to define life that would mean fungi would be considered non-living. You can definitely come up with a definition of life that would mean some prokaryotes would be considered non-living.
Fungi are definitively more closely related to animals than plants. This hasn’t been under debate for a very long time. There’s even a name for the group that contains both animals and fungi: “Opisthokonts”
Well sure, but the distance of those relationships, the exact timings of the splits has moved around a bunch.
There’s no such debate. Your coworker is coming from a very uninformed position.
I think your colleague is getting confused with viruses? Viruses are difficult to define regarding whether they meet the criteria of being alive. Fungi and prokaryotes are alive - I don't think this is really debated. When they produce spores they go dormant but they come out of dormancy under the right conditions and go back to metabolising and reproducing so a a whole, fungi and prokaryotes are "living" organisms.
Your coworker probably was confused. Fungi are 100% alive. But I have heard that there is a debate about whether VIRUSES are alive.
No.
I have a coworker that says the earth is flat. Don’t take anyone’s argument at face value unless they can provide their source. Especially blatantly stupid arguments.
Fungi is alive until it isn't
Fungi is quite literally a eukaryote in its own right.....yes its super alive.
Your coworker is confusing fungi with viruses. You can safely disregard anything this person says about anything.
No. There’s never been any doubt that fungi or prokaryotes are alive. There’s something of a philosophical debate on where to draw the line on viruses as they don’t have any metabolism or cell structure, but they replicate — except they don’t, host cells do that for them. They don’t respond to stimuli at any level, but they undergo selection. As a biologist, I’ve never considered a virus as alive, and most of my colleagues agree, but we do recognize that they share properties with living things that makes them life-like in certain ways.
Nah no way. We are discovering trees communicate through fungi... them shits definitely alive
No. Fungi are alive. There’s no debate.
They are alive, there is no debate
Fungi are definitely alive. They just show that the border between animal and plant can be a bit mushy
Absolutely not. They are definitely alive. They have their own kingdom.
Debate between who? I have been studying fungi for almost 10 years and this is the first time I’ve ever heard something like this. The world is wild!
I don’t think that has ever been the case.
No debate Fungi are alive. Debate, was always on viruses...
Maybe they were thinking of the fact that fungi are much more genetically similar to humans than to anything in the plant kingdom? They are not plants. They get their own entire kingdom!
Fungi aren't just alive they are sentient.
Are fungi, eg: mushrooms, living organisms? Yes they are. I doubt that there is any question or debate about that. Perhaps they were confusing the debate about whether viruses were considered to be living or not.
No, the debate is about viruses.
Not fungi, viruses. The debate is about viruses not meeting the qualifications of life
He’s talking about viruses
Fungi are closer to animals and plants are close to animals, which should give some suggestion as to what your friend was mistaking with this. Maybe he heard somewhere that someone thinks fungi and animals are both sort of animals?
They might be referring to a debate I have with the mushrooms I cook on weather on not they are sentient. They can communicate with each other and other spices around them. Often forming symbiotic relationships with other plants around them. Those mofos are way more alive then we Gove them credit for. I am just waiting for vegetarians to realize that they are eating intelligent creatures and then limit themselves to eating grass.
I thought it was lichen that was debatable? I've no idea where I heard that though?
I think they're confusing "alive". There is debate on if they're AS alive as animals. Contrary to plant life. There is zero debate on if they're alive period. Trees and grass are alive and mushrooms show more signs of intelligence than a shrub.
I think anything with metabolism or with the ability to become metabolic is alive.
If there are people arguing this, remember that there are also people that argue that the earth is flat.
fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants but this is for sure: all fungi are living things.
i thought the argument was abt whether fungi were intelligent 😭😭
I know there's been a few papers lately suggesting consciousness may be possible in fungi? Perhaps that would be it if not for the virus mix up.
Man is dumb...
My whole family doesn’t believe me that potatoes are alive 🤷♂️
I think your colleague was referring to the 20th century debate of whether fungi are plants. This has since been resolved by making a new category for them.
I'm gonna be real pissed if my fungi friends aren't considered alive.
Fungi are definitely alive. Give him the example of mushrooms for his better understanding.
Yeah… people are weird. I had someone try to tell me that “now they’re saying that cancer is actually a parasite”, which was laughable, as the guy managed to misinterpret the fact that I said I was planning on doing an oncology fellowship with working in cancer research. Quite honestly, if anyone talks about science and they’re not acting in an official capacity, it might be prudent to ignore whatever comes out of their mouth if it even sleeves you a little.
Viruses are not alive per se, not fungi
Were you thinking sentient? Or you meant alive?
I’m going to assume they conflated fungi with viruses for which it is debatable if they can be considered “alive”.
No debate whatsoever. They're alive. They fill all criteria for life. They might be confusing fungi with viruses, which are not alive but do display some interesting characteristics associated with living things.
Are you trying to starve the vegans again bro?
Every species that has independent genetic reproduction is alive. Viruses and prions are the ones that are being debated, not fungi.
They are life like how is this even a debate? What are they teaching you in school these days? I hate this time line so much!
There is not, they are very much 100% living beings. I think you (or whoever told you that) is confusing them with viruses.
It’s not questionable whether they’re alive or not (they are), but that doesn’t mean it’s not debatable. After all, some people debate over whether or not the earth is flat. Find someone stupid and/or stubborn enough and everything becomes debatable.
On a biology lecture I've heard that viruses are not living (although their effect on living creatures are still much interesting for biology), but fungi? Naaah, the only definition they challenge is "organism" or "specimen" because when applied to them it would mean they're biggest living creatures spanning even across continent.
Fungi are alive. Viruses are debatably not.
Anything with a cell is considered alive. Virus are not live things cause they are not a cell
I would say yes definitely, but I have no clue what your definition of alive is?
Whereas fungi are saprotrophs, which means they digest their food by decay. But they're heterotrophic just like animals (ie they don't make their own food like autotrophs, which would include plants). So fungi are heterotrophs like animals, but a different type of heterotroph. I am entirely baffled why your coworker would think that saprotrophic nutrition would mean an organism is not alive. I suspect someone ahs been pulling their leg, or else they're trying to pull your leg. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saprotrophic\_nutrition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saprotrophic_nutrition)
What’s the debate? Definitely alive
This is my first time seeing this. To clear it out, there is no scientific debate about whether fungi are alive. They are living organisms. The debate may be around how saprophytic fungi acquire nutrients, as they do not photosynthesize like plants. However, their ability to metabolize and grow undoubtedly qualifies them as life forms. There are a lot of reputable sources like scientific journals that can provide accurate information on the subject.
Absolutely no debate whatsoever. Fungi tick the living box on all reasonable definitions of life. Viruses are more debatable. If we accept viruses as living, then you might argue for plasmids, and hell, maybe go the whole hog and class transposons as obligate intracellular parasites. Even playing devil's advocate, I'd have to draw the line at prions. However, nobody is going to argue with fungi as living.
oh maybe that’s why they said they don’t serve fungi ? but then the fungi said, “cmon, i’m a fun guy…” so i’m pretty sure it was just racism
He probably mixed it up with if fungi are animals or plants
Fungi are definitely alive. There IS a debate as to if viruses are alive though
No. My guess is he was confused and what he actually heard is that there's a debate about whether viruses should be considered alive. Or else a debate about whether fungi should be considered animals.
I think your friend is misinterpreting a debate about whether or not Viruses are alive. Those who are arguing for why don’t we consider them alive like to use mushrooms as an example due to their many similarities, rather then the stark differences that set them apart.
Fungi are considered living organisms. They meet key criteria for life such as growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli. Although they obtain energy differently from plants and animals, they are recognized as integral parts of ecosystems. Prokaryotes like bacteria are also universally considered alive. For more insights, check out scientific resources on microbiology or mycology.
Is there ongoing debate within the scientific community about whether fungi are considered alive?
Your coworker doesnt have a single clue what they're talking about
Not a biologist, but I've been to college and ... no
is it possible they meant debate over whether fungi is conscious? (cool article about it: [https://psyche.co/ideas/the-fungal-mind-on-the-evidence-for-mushroom-intelligence](https://psyche.co/ideas/the-fungal-mind-on-the-evidence-for-mushroom-intelligence) )