In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery

Post by sevenless » Wed, Jun 22, 2016, 10:35 PM UTC

roye wrote: post #48

sevenless wrote: post #4

I find it fascinating we still don't really know how life works. I have a hunch we are going to find the large scale 3D structure of the chromosome is a big deal, and these genes regulate it. There aren't many good tools to study chromosome structure and it's quite possible there's a whole layer of information we've missed so far.

Actually there are new approaches to study exactly that, and they are developing rapidly, cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_conformation_captur... Basically, this problem, along with a long list of other applications is being attacked by deep sequencing. The way it works is that you apply a treatment to DNA that 'glues' 3D contacts in place and covers the glued segment, apply restriction enzymes to cut out…

Post by sevenless » Wed, Jun 22, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #113

coldcode wrote: post #30

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.

I don't know. The definition of "life" seems so arbitrary and nebulous. It seems really more like we're trying to attribute properties based on a wishful interpretation of emergent behaviour that ultimately boils down to extremely convoluted chemical reactions. Trying to produce genuinely novel and distinct biological lifeforms sounds cool enough on its own though.

Post by schoen » Wed, Jun 22, 2016, 11:36 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #67

gort wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Isn't the current theory that all life on Earth has a common ancestor? Wouldn't this point put that into question" Not really. For one thing there's too much commonality across life in terms of things like the genetic code, i.e. what a sequence of genetic letters "means". The genetic code is arbitrary but essentially universal with minor variants. For another thing, the organisms now present can be separated from ea…

Deep down, somewhere in the genetic code, it still says "Mozilla (compatible)"

Post by dnautics » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 12:41 AM UTC

civilian wrote: post #99

phkahler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Firstly what constitutes "minimal" depends on what you feed the organism. So maybe the environment needs to be changed to support an organism with a smaller genome. The world today is certainly different than when life began. It's probably difficult to evolve the environment, so they'd need to understand what goes wrong with gene deletions and figure out how a different environment could help.

When dnautics says "different environment" he's not talking about the global environment, he's talking about the environment around the cell. A minimal viable cell should be able to survive on water, some dissolved gasses, and an energy source like glucose. Bacteria that have even smaller genomes are doing that by stealing components from other lifeforms. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong, but I think you're reall…

Post by rosser » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:11 AM UTC

whoopdedo wrote: post #119

dnautics wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Most of the mystery essential genes are vague cell wall proteins. Probably what is going on is that if you knock out too many of these genes, you lose cell wall turgidity and the cell becomes nonviable. So what is important is not so much which of these genes you have, but how many of them you have. Sounds like dependency hell. Gene A only works in the presence of Gene B which only works when there's Gene C which n…