Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

caltech.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 102 posts

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#41

Post by observationist »

ssivark wrote: post #32
trebligdivad wrote: post #14

That page numbers in books were only invented 50 years after the printing press is a fun snippet from the article

The early printing press was probably focused on short few page documents (an increasing scale), and it wouldn't be surprising if page numbers were a solution to help printers not mix up pages.

The Gutenberg Bible was one of the first mass produced books - no page numbers on early copies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#/media/File:Gu...

Hindsight is 20/20 , lol. There are so many obvious, effective constructs and functions in modern English, we kinda miss the absolute janky mess of hacking and tradition and arbitrary rules and facepalm moments that went in to the last 1500+ years of development, let alone the tens of thousands of years prior.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#42

Post by a_better_world »

vee-kay wrote: post #12
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh if only science was not constrained by ethics. I can already see the people protesting against the creation of space marines.

Science has never been constrained by ethics. The same scientists who cry about ethics, have happily experimented on mice and guinea pigs in their labs, even if it causes the deaths or distress of those little sentient beings. Mutations/mutatives like Halo's Master Chief and Marvel's Super Soldier serum won't remain sci-fi for much longer, methinks.

former practicing scientist at an institute whose name you would recognize.

The field may not be fully constrained by ethics, which is just a way of saying that the work is done by people and people have varying ethical bounds, but from what I saw many of my colleagues were highly ethics driven.

I remember one Russian colleague who smuggled blood products out of Russia so they could be tested for HIV. Because the Russian government refused to help these patients. The man risked his life to help HIV sufferers.

Ethics is best when matched with courage, if a person is willing to put their life on the line for their beliefs.

Also noting that in the western world, experiments generally need approval of an ethics board before proceeding. That board's sense of ethics might make different judgments than you on, for example, mice experiments, but there is a big difference between "not constrained" and "some of the constraints are different than what I would choose".

where in this case, the ethics boards decided that provided a certain risk/reward barrier is crossed, and that the animals are otherwise treated well, sacrificing mice to improve human health is just fine.

That is an ethics based decision that was debated for a long time. And maybe should continue to be debated, there is real value in your stance that all beings are sentient and this demands a level of care.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#43

Post by epistasis »

nullbyte808 wrote: post #17

Such a simple concept took this long to discover? Now we just need a way of packing the DNA strings into blank cells reliably.

It's a lot like TikTok, right? It's a very simple concept: immediately produce customized video recommendations taking into account even the most recent interactions.

You just need a way to pack the TikToks into blank data centers.

(Note: blank data centers is a concept that kind of sorta makes sense. A blank cell doesn't make any sense at all)

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#45

Post by Kirr »

Very cool, but may have some unexpected consequences. E.g., someone can probably use this to synthesize a bacterial genome containing every known drug resistance gene, and this is just the first thing that comes to mind. Possibilities for bioeconomy indeed.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#46

Post by GlibMonkeyDeath »

What really blows my mind about this is that they are using off-the-shelf T4 Ligase to ligate the junctions. I figured this was going to be some tour-de-force of enzyme engineering, but nope, all the reagents are pretty much commercially available.

It is super clever and exciting. Note that people have been able to assemble short (<100 bases) DNA oligomer fragments of synthetic DNA into longer fragments using "splint" oligos since forever. But in this case, each splint has to be custom engineered to only bind to the junction of interest (in practice it is pretty tricky and expensive to do this.) These guys figured out a way to use engineered sequences to make the match, and used a clever (but also more or less standard) way to chew up the engineered stuff, leaving behind only the desired long assembly with no scars at the end of the process.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#47

Post by jryb »

Kirr wrote: post #45

Very cool, but may have some unexpected consequences. E.g., someone can probably use this to synthesize a bacterial genome containing every known drug resistance gene, and this is just the first thing that comes to mind. Possibilities for bioeconomy indeed.

You don't need to synthesize an entire bacterial genome from scratch to do this. You can just insert them one at a time into existing bacteria. Or just give them plasmids. Anyway, the ability to achieve the outcome you're describing has existed for decades.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#48

Post by biophysboy »

oofbey wrote: post #35
biophysboy wrote: post #28

Chemical modifications of DNA are so amazing, and underpin so much DNA related research and engineering. Illumina and Moderna would not exist without DNA mods. It’s very cool that the set of tools is expanding further! “ Guided by the removable DNA page numbers, Sidewinder achieves an incredibly high fidelity in DNA construction with a measured misconnection rate of just one in one million, a four to five magnitude i…

Intuitively I agree some kind of selective amplification should be able to correct for the mistakes. But I think it will be complicated. Because the filtering process needs to be much more complex. It can’t just chemically match to a known subsequence - you won’t know where the mistake might be in a long sequence.

This is a good point. WXYZ and WYXZ are indistinguishable via PCR. And the possibilities accumulate with more segments.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#49

Post by vee-kay »

a_better_world wrote: post #42
vee-kay wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science has never been constrained by ethics. The same scientists who cry about ethics, have happily experimented on mice and guinea pigs in their labs, even if it causes the deaths or distress of those little sentient beings. Mutations/mutatives like Halo's Master Chief and Marvel's Super Soldier serum won't remain sci-fi for much longer, methinks.

former practicing scientist at an institute whose name you would recognize. The field may not be fully constrained by ethics, which is just a way of saying that the work is done by people and people have varying ethical bounds, but from what I saw many of my colleagues were highly ethics driven. I remember one Russian colleague who smuggled blood products out of Russia so they could be tested for HIV. Because the Rus…

@a_better_world: (apt username for this conversation!)

I do understand what you mean, and I do comprehend that animal testing cannot be avoided for scientific advancements to help and progress humanity.

But I have a simple motto I want to adhere to (it is very hard though, to practice it in principle and action daily): Ethics is best when it is for the good of humanity, without being bad for Earth.

In recent years, I am starting to feel humanity is sharply veering away from its basic ethics (and the first ethic must be to not shit where one eats - but hey, we are actively aggressively destroying the only beautiful bountiful planet we know of, that can support humanity), and doing whatever the top richest most-powerful elites want.

And this unbridled greed and apathy is going to sow the seeds for the downfall of humanity, I'm afraid. At the cost of our precious Earth and its other denizens who share this planet with us humans.

There has been a catastrophic 73% decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations* in just 50 years (1970-2020), according to World Wildlife Fund‘s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2024.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j0vzpl3o

Forests around the world disappeared at a rate of 18 soccer fields every minute, a global survey found.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/climate/deforestation-wri...

Our generation is the last one that can still save the wild forests of the Earth, which help us cope with the climate crisis and preserve the biodiversity of the planet. A new study by Greenpeace Russia and the University of Maryland has shown that if urgent and effective measures are not taken to preserve wild forests, most of them will disappear in the next 20 years.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/51810/wild-fo...

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#50

Post by bookofjoe »

swalsh wrote: post #25
trebligdivad wrote: post #14

That page numbers in books were only invented 50 years after the printing press is a fun snippet from the article

Many times obvious things are only obvious once you see them. Like roller suitcases.

See also: the wheel
Post reply on HN