Could we better not?
Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#62That page numbers in books were only invented 50 years after the printing press is a fun snippet from the article
Sometime after 685 AD, they invented spaces between words. All text - in Latin to that point, mostly - was written in scriptio continua. All sorts of ambiguity and hilarity would ensue; to be a good writer, you needed to ensure that words didn't bleed together and form incorrect meanings in unintended combinations. If you lost your place when reading, you'd have to know generally where you were in a scroll, and resta…
yeah - under certain "the winners write the history" framework, I believe that scribes did not add spaces between "words".. However, the world is a big place; history is long.
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#63That page numbers in books were only invented 50 years after the printing press is a fun snippet from the article
I can see how it wculd take that long to realize it would be nice to have a way to tell people which page to look at in their exact copy of a book.
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#64For someone in Software what is a good way to learn the fundamentals of this?
If you live near a community bio lab see if you can join up and take some classes to learn some basic lab techniques. And some sort of intro bio class via mooc/textbook/local college class whatever if you can but community lab is honestly a great place to start if you have one. The main thing to keep in mind is that all the stuff that involves analogies between software and biology is almost universally a bullshit ov…
Follow up question (Not OP), would alphafold more be used to experiment with an already-defined theory that you have, or could you also make some toy projects (e.g. how people make projects around trading engines).
I'm wondering if I could find a fun weekend project in alphafold just to see what it's like.
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#65This is probably the only way "humans" are going to colonize any planets other than Earth. And probably lots of new places on Earth too. Just include the genes for extreme-cold or extreme-arid climates. Or the genes for low oxygen environments, or even for metabolizing useful things from eating rocks. Or from spending 24 hours a day in salt water.
Is there a gene to avoid getting addicted to doomscrolling? ;-)
Relevant and topical..
TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be Illegal in Europe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911869
Gen Z less intelligent than millennials: How skipping books and doomscrolling are taking a toll on cognitive abilities: says Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/India/gen-z-less-intelligent-...
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#66For someone in Software what is a good way to learn the fundamentals of this?
If you live near a community bio lab see if you can join up and take some classes to learn some basic lab techniques. And some sort of intro bio class via mooc/textbook/local college class whatever if you can but community lab is honestly a great place to start if you have one. The main thing to keep in mind is that all the stuff that involves analogies between software and biology is almost universally a bullshit ov…
TIL community biolabs are a thing ...
Are they really? Is this just limited to some very specific areas with an active biotech scene?
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometime after 685 AD, they invented spaces between words. All text - in Latin to that point, mostly - was written in scriptio continua. All sorts of ambiguity and hilarity would ensue; to be a good writer, you needed to ensure that words didn't bleed together and form incorrect meanings in unintended combinations. If you lost your place when reading, you'd have to know generally where you were in a scroll, and resta…
Hittite was putting spaces between words in the 17th century BCE. And if we're just interested in Latin, it used the interpunct as a word divider hundreds of years before the use of the space as word divider happened. The use of scriptio continua despite knowledge of word dividers was a choice.
I wonder, how much was gatekeeping, keeping things hard on purpose, how much waas inertia, "that's just the way things are done", and how much was a kind of despairing "holy shit, it'd be so much work to have to go through and recopy everything in the new format, literally decades of effort, and there's other things we want to do with our lives".
The whole context of written words had so much implicit process and knowledge and institutional memory, compared to now when we have petabytes of throwaway logs and trivial scratchpads for software running on a "just in case I might need to figure something out" basis. I'd love to see a written word graph over time, starting ~4k BC to now. And the complexity and diversity of those automated words are going up like crazy since LLMs.
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I briefly scanned the paper. The above summary is garbage. For a biologist, a summary might be like this: pcr fragments are generated with short reverse complementary sequences added to the end of one fragment that match that at the begining of the next to-be-joined fragment. These will anneal to create a cross-shaped DNA molecule. The short arms of the cross being the complementary sequences. Like so: ======∥===== T…
So do the complementary sequences naturally bind to their neighbors? So you just mix the “pages” in a soup for a while until they all find their friends. And then the custom enzyme (or what is it) just slices off the three way junctions? Really clever.
That's right.
It's one of those elegant solutions that just seem so obvious once they're presented. But this lot did it first.
Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
#69What 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…
Yes, it's very elegant! It's one of those things you wish you had thought of yourself. Kudos to these guys for being first.