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New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

sciencemag.org

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Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#61

Post by hyperbovine »

danharaj wrote: post #7
ccvannorman wrote: post #5

* 'Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, "We need to rethink what genes are,"…

This is why you should be very skeptical of anyone who claims transparency between genetics and complex phenotypes.

The genetic basis of complex traits was the biggest open problem in science (IMO) long before this discovery came along.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#62

Post by hndamien »

skissane wrote: post #57
Dev_2019 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?

Define "curing". Is it giving some decent percentage of people an extra 10, 20, maybe even 30 years of reasonably healthy life, compared to what they have today? Or is it making people live forever? The first objective, as challenging as it is, sounds a lot more plausible than the second. If we ever achieve either, I'm sure the first will be reached long before the second is. By a literal definition of "curing", only…

You might be able to cure dying without curing age related degeneration of the body. Migrating minds outside of the body might be possible. To me it seems quite likely.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#63

Post by hndamien »

Andrex wrote: post #45
sedeki wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I understand that you are a layperson, but that’s a very strong statement in my view. What do you base it on? Or did you just pull it ”out of a hat”?

As a layperson: Changing genetics seems to me a bit like changing an engine in-flight. Mappping the brain to a computer is more like building a plane from scratch in a hangar. In a computer, we build the materials but we also build the world around them. With biology, all we have to work with is are the real-life materials, which are harder to grok than their digital equivalents.

Piece by piece migration/replacement into a computer/ artificial neurons seems more likely. Still a gargantuan task with the requirement of a gargantuan amount of neurons.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#64

Post by tolstoshev »

hprotagonist wrote: post #14
Jaygles wrote: post #2

Imagine trying to understand biology like we try to understand what we code day to day. I would need a brain at least 100x as large and efficient.

This is "the andy grove fallacy": it's not clear that you actually can , because code and computational hardware was designed by humans and biology emphatically was not. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...

I'm starting to wonder if there are physical limits to cognition and if we've already hit them. Maybe it's impossible for the physical universe to understand its own complexity.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#65

Post by barkingcat »

paulsutter wrote: post #43
hprotagonist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fsvo "proof", i'm willing to take it as an axiom that biological systems are fractally weird in ways that are extremely resistant to formalism.

The patterns will be understood, by machines in whole and by people in part. To think it’s impossible seems ... religious

irrationality is not religiosity.

You can calculate digits of Pi, but can't understand why Pi is the way it is ... Do you call the assumption that humans and computers can never understand why Pi is the way it is, and that you cannot extract understandable patterns from Pi (or any irrational number for that matter) a religious idea?

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#67

Post by hprotagonist »

stevenhuang wrote: post #58
mvcalder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, From where I sit, to think it's possible seems ... religous. To each his own I guess.

But to think it won't _ever_ be possible? After a thousand years of research?

in a thousand years, of course, the things we're researching will be a thousand years differently evolved.

My point, mostly, is that any "law" of biology i've ever encountered has an "except sometimes when ..." clause. I do not expect that to change; biology is best described in the language of probability, and evolution (if i may anthropomorphize it so without peril) is very good at ruthlessly exploiting edge cases.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#68

Post by q6467655 »

dboreham wrote: post #52
dfsegoat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The whole "One Gene, One Protein [One Phenotype]" [1] dogma went out quite some time ago. ... But people and genetic testing companies seem to want to keep it going. [1] - https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/george-w-beadles-one-gene-one-e...

We will eventually find that there's the equivalent of JPEG encoding (plus SSL and ECC) and that today we're doing the equivalent of someone with no knowledge of SSL or JPEG staring at a tcpdump trace of a browser loading an image over https, trying to make sense of the resulting hex dump.

Can you elaborate - I’ve always been fascinated hearing CS interpretations of biological processes.

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#69

Post by barkingcat »

stevenhuang wrote: post #58
mvcalder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, From where I sit, to think it's possible seems ... religous. To each his own I guess.

But to think it won't _ever_ be possible? After a thousand years of research?

That's not a difficult thing to imagine at all! Many mathematical problems have been unsolved in spite of a few thousands years of research! And math isn't nearly as weird as biological systems!

Re: New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

#70

Post by dekhn »

hprotagonist wrote: post #42
jdironman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are just in the debugging phase.

i've been doing biological/biomedical research for about 20 years now (god, that's a scary thought...) I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... : What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the…

this is literally why I went into bio after learning to program: I thought it was like being told "this is a computer, but we have no manual, so just hack and let us know if you find something interesting".

30 years later, I'm back in computers because I can't deal with the constant ambiguity in bio.

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