31–40 of 152 posts
There are a number of questions that are probably answered behind the paywalled article... * In order to reproduce (and maintain the new bases in its DNA), does the organism need a source of these nucleotides in its growth medium? (i.e. in its food?) The alternative would be to produce them itself, but that would require scarily advanced genetic engineering, I think. * If one of these bases is in a gene, what happens…
So 5 letter codes are all taken now?
So 5 letter codes are all taken now?
"create organisms with wholly unnatural attributes and traits not found elsewhere in nature" I'd argue that this shouldn't add anything categorically new, just like switching from 32 to 64 bit programs doesn't change the world.
Star Trek depicted one of the scarier applications of such a technology: There, The Jem'Hadaar are a genetically engineered race of warriors controlled by the Dominion, who exert power over them by being the sole provider of a substance (Ketracel-White) that they need in order to survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Star_Trek) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ketracel-white If my reading of the paper is…
I just watched an old X Files episode (season 1) apparently aliens have six base pairs.
So 5 letter codes are all taken now?
How do you propose to make pairs out of an odd number? Each nucleotide binds to only one other nucleotide.
A:T T:A C:G G:C P:P
Can the organism replicate the XY pairs during DNA replication (and pass it on to divided cells)? I haven't seen that mentioned, only that it "holds onto it for its entire lifespan" which is not clear to me. There's also nothing about the interaction of these pairs with existing mechanisms, like transcription (DNA-->RNA) and translation (RNA-->protein). Could the new new pair increase the space of aminoacids from whi…
The achievement is that the E. Coli lifetime is not affected. The XY's are probably inserted in a part of the DNA that is not transcribed.
Star Trek depicted one of the scarier applications of such a technology: There, The Jem'Hadaar are a genetically engineered race of warriors controlled by the Dominion, who exert power over them by being the sole provider of a substance (Ketracel-White) that they need in order to survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Star_Trek) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ketracel-white If my reading of the paper is…
Genetically modified organisms are a bit scary, but genetically modified organisms that replicate autonomously are more than a bit scary. As programmers - a profession that managed to spread Shellshock, the dumbest imaginable backdoor, so widely as to make much of human population vulnerable, we should understand this better than others. We have no idea what happens in our own code, code that we copy from place to place ourselves, written in languages we designed and running on machines we designed, and there's nothing like mutation and self-replication with this stuff, for the most part. I kinda doubt that biologists modifying "code" which is actually pretty large molecules existing and interacting in a 3D space with a lot of forces pulling and pushing things, and without the benefit of comments or design documents, can make something that can be trusted to autonomously replicate and gradually mutate.