Viewing profile — ababaian

University of Toronto | Postdoc: Synthetic + Molecular Biology on Microplastics | ONSITE Toronto, ON We’re engineering enzymes to degrade microplastics using AI + high-throughput m…

The Laboratory for RNA-Based Lifeforms | University of Toronto | Full-Time | ONSITE | RNAlab.ca Howdy, The Laboratory of RNA-Based Lifeforms based out of UofT is looking for post-d…

Not sure I understand. Obelisks seems an inert descriptor to me, it has no connotation in the field so it's appropriately a blank slate.

How would they exist/maintain themselves without it's DNA counterpart?

Vanya thought that when you run them through the RNA folding software, it would give you these unusual straight rods which reminded him of Cleopatra's Needle (Obelisk, https://en.w…

Absolutely, reading Selfish Gene in high school set me on the path to this type of exploration. Genes, in the pure abstract sense, are the unit by which we interrogate understand e…

I like to view it that we're all RNA-based lifeforms. Operationally: DNA, RNA, or other are just a vehicles which hold our information. This podcast RadioLab with Carl Zimmer (11m)…

That's exactly what they are though, some piece of garbage RNA cells are producing. A lot of things meet that definition if you think about it.

It's not OT at all. It depends on what you mean exactly by LLM, but we use them all the time. ESMFold2 was an LLM [ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade2574 ] and was in…

The classic phylogenetic classes are a fantastic model, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong :) Phylogeny is the study by which things relate to one another. Ther…

These are two distinct questions. Are Obelisks part of the self? If you think of the "host" as being made up by it's DNA, then these are not part of that set, since they are not fo…

We certainly have the data, too much so actually. I should correct the statement to say, we have insufficiently developed _applied_ information theory. We know how to quantify homo…

What have Obelisks ever done to you? Our first reaction shouldn't be to kill everything we don't understand :'( Good pragmatic question though. It's not clear if any drugs up- or d…

If you want the real mind-trip, try to think about how little we know about detecting "life" that is not based on nucleic acids.

Not that I know of, although this doesn't mean it isn't happening, it's something which has to be investigated in detail.

I understood as much. My point is that it's not clear to me that it will be a biologist, and not a statistician/mathematician, or developer/data-scientist that will be the one to s…

There's literally no experts on the subject.

I should certainly hope so.

Don't be a dick. It's totally normal to be skeptical and doubtful of some over-the-top claims. The onus is squarely on the person presenting the information to justify it. Your poi…

Everyday I get to do this kind of research, I'm grateful to be the one doing it.

I think this is the journalist playing at the idea that we don't have a universally accepted definitions of "life", "virus", "viroids", "mobile genetic elements", "plasmids", or th…

To the limits of where our understanding of how "entities" are connected to one another (homology). Yes, there's nothing like them. You could make an argument they are "viroid-like…

The most limiting is our own imaginations. For the nuts and bolts: a class of really engaged and brilliant students at UofT recently documented the tools and methodology to go abou…

I hold no prejudice against the 'soft sciences', or for literature, or for music, or for athletics or for any other human pursuit which demands merit. I am genuinely curious as to …

What's your definition of replication?