111–120 of 144 posts
"The function of 79 genes is a complete mystery.'We don't know what they provide or why they are essential for life — maybe they are doing something more subtle, something obviously not appreciated yet in biology' " It is the activation key God puts on each living being... Ain't gonna work without it. =P
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It makes you wonder if we are trying to understand biological systems with a fundamentally wrong approach. Got a better idea?
The last couple pages of the aforementioned paper give some thoughts on that. The author suggests an approach more like engineering that is focused on formalized mathematical descriptions of biological systems.
If I were a biology/biochem/genetics/etc type of student today this is exactly what I would love to work on. Perhaps someday we will actually understand how life works. That's both exciting and incredibly scary.
Trying to produce genuinely novel and distinct biological lifeforms sounds cool enough on its own though.
Interesting work, but it reminds me of the famous "Could a biologist fix a radio?" paper [1]. The paper imagines biologists trying to determine what parts of a radio are essential using a similar trial and error technique. As you can imagine, this technique would lead to many erroneous conclusions, especially when paired with the "publish or perish" and "gold rush" mentalities so prevalent in academia. It makes you w…
TL;DR: Venter and his collaborators originally set out to design a stripped-down genome based on what scientists knew about biology. ... With the right tools finally in hand, the researchers designed a set of genetic blueprints for their minimal cell and then tried to build them. Yet “not one design worked," ... So the team took a different and more labor-intensive tack, replacing the design approach with trial and e…
Is there a single set of instructions needed for Turing Completeness? It's possible to have Turing Completeness in a random access machine with just one instruction. I should think you really need to satisfy certain capabilities, and there would be many ways to satisfy those.
Forgive my complete ignorance, but how do they even count genes? Given a very long string of base pairs, how is it possible to know where one gene ends and the next one begins? Do genes overlap?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_codon and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_codon
Forgive my complete ignorance, but how do they even count genes? Given a very long string of base pairs, how is it possible to know where one gene ends and the next one begins? Do genes overlap?
"The function of 79 genes is a complete mystery.'We don't know what they provide or why they are essential for life — maybe they are doing something more subtle, something obviously not appreciated yet in biology' " It is the activation key God puts on each living being... Ain't gonna work without it. =P
TL;DR: Venter and his collaborators originally set out to design a stripped-down genome based on what scientists knew about biology. ... With the right tools finally in hand, the researchers designed a set of genetic blueprints for their minimal cell and then tried to build them. Yet “not one design worked," ... So the team took a different and more labor-intensive tack, replacing the design approach with trial and e…
I worked in the synthetic biology lab (on a different project) while the early stages of the Syn3.0 was being done, and also have paid several visits to chat with them in the meantime. [Proof: first author on http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms16012020 ] I was a fly on the wall for most of the group meetings and even contributed some unpublished results (there were transposons that were causing problems by shuffling the t…
Sounds like dependency hell. Gene A only works in the presence of Gene B which only works when there's Gene C which needs Gene A. Knock any one of them out and everything breaks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know an article about that? Did not find anything about a life form without DNA, except http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101202-nasa-... . The definition of life itself is not really obvious to me either, some sources count viruses as life other don't.
The definition of life is a tricky question. The most obvious example is red blood cells dump their DNA. So they can't replicate, and virus can't target them. However, insect drones also can't reproduce and are considered alive so it's a little more open to debate than you might think. As to life without DNA. The methodology is somewhat in question for this but here is a more in depth link: http://science.sciencemag.…