DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
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Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#2A man-made ATP synthase?! Very cool!
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#3For some reason, what actually stands out to me in this paper is the method in which they verified the rotational motion. They used single-molecule fluorescence and optically tracked the circular trajectories that the single molecule traced out while spinning. That's the most impressive part, in my opinion... I didn't know we could even resolve fluorescing particles on that scale, much less track their trajectories over time.
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#4For some reason, what actually stands out to me in this paper is the method in which they verified the rotational motion. They used single-molecule fluorescence and optically tracked the circular trajectories that the single molecule traced out while spinning. That's the most impressive part, in my opinion... I didn't know we could even resolve fluorescing particles on that scale, much less track their trajectories o…
See the section titled "Fluorescence microscopy data analysis". Basically, when you have a single molecule fluorescing you "just" need to do some math to figure out the center of the samples over time. See https://www.microscope.healthcare.nikon.com/products/super-r... for an overview
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#5For some reason, what actually stands out to me in this paper is the method in which they verified the rotational motion. They used single-molecule fluorescence and optically tracked the circular trajectories that the single molecule traced out while spinning. That's the most impressive part, in my opinion... I didn't know we could even resolve fluorescing particles on that scale, much less track their trajectories o…
See the section titled "Fluorescence microscopy data analysis". Basically, when you have a single molecule fluorescing you "just" need to do some math to figure out the center of the samples over time. See https://www.microscope.healthcare.nikon.com/products/super-r... for an overview
thanks for sharing.
since you sound like an expert, do you know if this technique works for live imaging of RNA molecules or would tagging such a small molecule potentially alter biological processes and contaminate results?
[edited to clarify live-imaging requirement]
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#6Here's something I've been wondering that maybe some smart hackernews-ian can explain to me. I watched a spider build a web last night. A ton of extremely complicated engineering went into it, all driven by pure instinct, presumably coded in DNA somewhere.
If you gave me enough time I could lay out how a semi-conducting material turns into a T-gate transistor, which can be chained with other transistors to create AND, OR, NOT and NOR gates, which are executed in the CPU by machine language code, which is created by compiling down from higher-level C code, which is executed by Javascript code running in the browser, which uses React to power the Facebook front end. Maybe I missed a step in there, but you get the idea.
Is that how DNA tells a spider how to build a web? Or tells me I should drink water when I feel thirsty? Does it all boil down to ones and zeros stored in protein sequences? And if so, are there layers of abstraction like in computer code? Or is there some other fundamental mechanism?
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#7Here's something I've been wondering that maybe some smart hackernews-ian can explain to me. I watched a spider build a web last night. A ton of extremely complicated engineering went into it, all driven by pure instinct, presumably coded in DNA somewhere. If you gave me enough time I could lay out how a semi-conducting material turns into a T-gate transistor, which can be chained with other transistors to create AND…
biology and physics operate at more dimensions where physical forces conspire to be leveraged by some neat tricks. Chemical gradients, various pressures, mechanical forces, electrostatic gradients, all sorts of differences out there to ride--some are passive, some are actively produced and take energy.
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#8Here's something I've been wondering that maybe some smart hackernews-ian can explain to me. I watched a spider build a web last night. A ton of extremely complicated engineering went into it, all driven by pure instinct, presumably coded in DNA somewhere. If you gave me enough time I could lay out how a semi-conducting material turns into a T-gate transistor, which can be chained with other transistors to create AND…
Also interested in the answer, and I thought a bit about this and have a hypothesis that DNA does not encode everything, instead it depends on implicit assumptions about the environment.
To give an example, gravity is likely not encoded in the DNA, but instead, there are many encoded behaviors that would make sense only on an environment where gravity is present. The same for the presence of predators, wind, solar radiation, etc., i.e. many of the things that we take for granted.
That's how you would get more than 750MB of behavior on 750MB of DNA data [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome#Information_conte...
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#9Here's something I've been wondering that maybe some smart hackernews-ian can explain to me. I watched a spider build a web last night. A ton of extremely complicated engineering went into it, all driven by pure instinct, presumably coded in DNA somewhere. If you gave me enough time I could lay out how a semi-conducting material turns into a T-gate transistor, which can be chained with other transistors to create AND…
Here is not a very good answer to your question, but think about how you know how to walk. It's something that is not entirely conscious. You legs just move between places that you desire to go without any thought to the angle of your knee or tension in your gluts. You feel unbalanced when you center of gravity is too far forward despite having no conscious understanding of where exactly your center of gravity is in the first place.
Spiders likely have a similar feeling but even further refined. They don't know how to build a truss, but they do end up building analogous structures because in their tiny bug brains it just feels right. This is the same way a human knows they are more stable with their legs spread apart and knees slightly bent. Part of that certainly comes from learning but a lot of it is built into our biology too.
Re: DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore
#10A man-made ATP synthase?! Very cool!
First thing that came to mind.
One of many mindblowing molecular genetic animation by Drew Barry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5AXGS1aL8
Zoomed out electron transport chain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmoLoiFakxY