[HN Gopher] Scientists create simple synthetic cell
___________________________________________________________________
Scientists create simple synthetic cell
Author : sdht0
Score : 230 points
Date : 2021-03-30 07:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nist.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nist.gov)
| [deleted]
| koeng wrote:
| JCVI-Syn3A has been around for a while. Here is the genome
| sequence from 2018 -
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/1241355755
|
| Back at FreeGenes we synthesized all of the genes from this
| organism with codon optimization for Escherichia coli
| (https://stanford.freegenes.org/collections/gene-
| sets/product...), the workhorse of synthetic biology. If you
| combine the right transcriptional and translational elements, you
| should be able to build a fully modular genome from this gene
| set! We also did a couple other organisms in pursuit of this
| modular genome. As a nice bonus, you can also easily do in-vitro
| cell-free experiments since the codon tables are nice (and I've
| heard from Kate Adamala's group that JCVI-Syn3 has pretty bad
| cell free, though that was a couple years ago)
|
| It's important to note that JCVI-Syn3A has a LOT of problems when
| it comes to its practical use. There just isn't enough energy
| being put into making an understandable and practical
| modular/minimal genome.
| mercurywells wrote:
| What is "pretty bad cell free"?
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| So can we say science has finally achieved a biological "Hello
| World"?
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Not exactly. These lines of cells weren't created from scratch.
| From the article:
|
| > Scientists at JCVI constructed the first cell with a
| synthetic genome in 2010. They didn't build that cell
| completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from
| a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They
| destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that
| was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was
| the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an
| entirely synthetic genome. They called it JCVI-syn1.0.
| dnautics wrote:
| "Hello World" isn't exactly created from scratch either.
| You're using libc in most cases.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Someone wrote it though. It's not a blackbox that's evolved
| independently for millions of years. We as a species know
| how to build one, since we did.
| blakesley wrote:
| I suppose this makes sense, but at a personal level, the
| two scenarios seem similar. Interpreters & compilers are
| blackbox to me, at least. I have no idea how they work,
| and I wouldn't be able to make one for myself. But sure,
| someone could teach me.
| maverick74 wrote:
| Exactly what i was writing!!! :)
|
| Now, i guess that - like last time - we're going to have news
| everywhere claiming that scientists "created life" (again).
|
| LOL
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Those gaps keep getting smaller and smaller though, don't
| they?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| I'm curious if they are going to 'ship of Theseus' it. First
| replace the dna, done, then the lipid membrane, then feed it
| C13 labelled amino acids to prove that the entirety of the
| cell proteom is from their synthetic genes.
|
| Not quite creating life but definitely hijacking it.
| dnautics wrote:
| Not specifically with C13, but that _is_ what is going on.
| lupire wrote:
| What would that mean?
| maverick74 wrote:
| No, because like in JCVI-syn1.0
|
| "They didn't build that cell completely from scratch. Instead,
| they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria
| called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and
| replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and
| synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the
| history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome."
|
| In another words, like in the previous attempt (in which i was
| equally amazed - at first - only to then became disappointed
| latter) THEY DID NOT CREATE LIFE!!!
|
| They picked up an already living organism and "reprogrammed
| it".
|
| Its like having a computer. They are learning to program, and
| remove all the unnecessary parts but they still don't have a
| clue on to build the hardware.
|
| The problem, it seems, is in transforming bare lifeless
| quimicals into something "alive".
|
| Creating life, it seems, is still something reserved only to
| God Himself! (and i suspect it's going to be like that for a
| loooong time, if we ever manage to accomplish it anyway)
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Intelligent Design as a theory for life's origins has
| received a lot of unfair criticism because people think it's
| code for "young earth creationism". It's not though, it's an
| observation that random natural processes are too slow at
| generating information to be responsible for life on earth.
|
| It's the same deductive logic you would use if you found an
| artifact in the middle of the desert. Yes natural forces
| could have carved an image from the rock, but the more
| detailed the image the less likely it arose naturally.
|
| The fact that even now, no one has any idea of how to create
| the basic forms of life shows the astonishing amount of
| information that exists in even a simple cell. It's time to
| reconsider intelligent design, even if the designer is an
| alien species or a programmer of a simulation. There's too
| much information to spontaneously generate, and we have never
| seen life come from non life.
|
| The theory has been essentially banished from academia for
| political, not scientific, reasons, but Michael Behe and
| Stephen Meyer's books, specifically Darwin's Doubt and
| Signature of the Cell, lay out the case in detail.
| yumraj wrote:
| So if you say that alien scientists created life on Earth
| and is hence intelligent design, sure why not. Earth could
| be some alien civilization's lab for all we know..
|
| But then at some point those aliens, or the ones that
| created them, or the ones that ...... created them ...,
| must have been created spontaneously.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Totally, it just moves the problem but potentially moves
| it to a larger search space. If you find a piece of
| marble isolated on top of a cliff it's not cheating to
| deduce that it came from a larger group of similar rocks.
| You would calculate the probability that it was formed
| there, vs the probability it was formed somewhere else
| and moved there.
| yumraj wrote:
| I think there is a flaw in the logic.
|
| Life forms spontaneously. Just because this life evolves
| into higher beings who can also create above life in lab,
| the fundamental fact that life formed spontaneously is
| not affected in any way.
| mssundaram wrote:
| Sorry for your down votes. I'm grateful that you would
| share this perspective. As a Hindu, science and religion
| are not conflicting. I'm looking forward to reading those
| two books you cite - thank you for sharing!
| selimthegrim wrote:
| It's been banished from non religious parts of academia
| because it's not falsifiable or testable, so it belongs in
| the theology department.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| It is testable, if a scientist creates life in a
| laboratory then intelligent design exists. It is
| falsifiable, you can compute the amount of information
| contained in biological structures, and compute whether
| known natural processes can create that amount of
| information on the timescale of the universe. If they
| can, intelligent design is falsified.
|
| Regardless, where the theory lives in the org chart is
| irrelevant to whether it is true or not, and it's
| certainly no worse than all the other origin of life
| speculation.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _If they can, intelligent design is falsified._
|
| That's not true, demonstrating that process A could have
| resulted in the observed effect does not show that
| process B did not cause it.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| If that's true every paper that references life's origins
| needs to be retracted. If natural processes can be
| responsible for abiogenesis then intelligent design
| becomes much less likely, which is as close to
| falsifiable as you can get for a statement of history.
| api wrote:
| The larger metaphysical claims are not testable. Some of
| the narrower claims are, such as that self-replicating
| evolvable structures cannot arise naturally.
|
| This basically amounts to the claim that the complexity
| floor of life is too high for such a structure to arise
| naturally over terrestrial time spans.
|
| Obviously a demonstration of abiogenesis would invalidate
| that claim. This could also be challenged by
| computational models that are sufficiently physically
| plausible, or the discovery or creation of even simpler
| lifeforms that extend the lower complexity bound of life
| down to regions that challenge the argument.
|
| Of course another possibility is that this is our Fermi
| paradox answer: life is in fact so profoundly unlikely
| that its frequency of occurrence is e.g. less than once
| per billion years per galaxy!
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Exactly, these are major themes in the books I posted.
| Darwin's Doubt deals specifically with the Cambrian
| Explosion and the explosion of information over a short
| time span that it represented. It digs deep into the
| search space of protein folds and epigenetic information
| and whether known evolutionary processes can be
| responsible for the original emergence of the simplest
| forms of life, or if there are even simpler forms of life
| possible that lived before the Cambrian Explosion.
| hnitbanalns wrote:
| I appreciate your posted alternative theory on this
| subject. It's refreshing.
| api wrote:
| We don't know how much information was required for the
| Cambrian explosion because we don't have DNA sequence
| information from that era. We can only guess based on the
| DNA sequence information of today or from recent (in
| geological terms) fossils frozen in ice cores, etc. All
| the DNA sequence info we have is actually extremely
| recent.
|
| It's possible that the very long "boring" period before
| the Cambrian explosion was in reality when a whole lot of
| stuff was being evolved that later all came together to
| allow large scale cellular cooperation.
|
| An analogy I like is a barn raising. If you watched a
| barn raising from very far away it would appear that
| nothing is happening and then boom, you get a barn. In
| reality the structure is being assembled slowly on the
| ground for a long time before anything "macro" happens.
| This analogy also comes up in regard to macroevolution
| and perhaps even abiogenesis.
|
| BTW it's important to remember that modern evolutionary
| theory does not include a theory of abiogenesis. Life is
| assumed to exist and evolutionary theory deals with how
| it changes over time. The origin of life is a separate
| (albeit related) scientific question and one for which we
| do not currently have an established answer. There are
| many credible hypotheses but so far no way to really test
| them.
| eloff wrote:
| The theory is banished because there is no supporting
| evidence for it - compared to evolution which has an
| enormous amount of supporting evidence. That's science
| working at its best, and nothing political.
|
| I say this as someone who once believed as you do, that
| you've been fooled, perhaps like me, by not honestly
| examining the evidence for the other side with an open
| mind. May you also find enlightenment.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Intelligent design is not incompatible with evolution, it
| deals with the origin of life not the process by which it
| adapts.
| maverick74 wrote:
| Ok... Let's put a end to this!
|
| GOD CREATED LIFE!
|
| There it is! I said it!
|
| And I'm going to say even more: there is absolutely no
| scientific proof that shows otherwise.
|
| In fact the complexity points keeps pointing this way.
| It's just a question of keeping the mind open. :)
|
| Ok... You can now ban me for my comment!
| eloff wrote:
| That's a very different intelligent design to what I've
| come across. I guess people had to try to salvage it
| somehow.
| sdht0 wrote:
| I want to clarify the idea here.
|
| 1) We don't know how life originated on Earth.
|
| 2) We don't have a full idea of what happened during the
| Cambrian explosion.
|
| 3) We don't know how human consciousness manifests itself
| in the brain.
|
| 4) Evolution by random natural processes is not possible
| without deliberate nudges.
|
| Is the claim here that 1-3 is simply not possible without
| an intelligent entity intervening in the natural laws? If
| so, I'm personally fine with it. God (who is the most
| popular potential Intelligent Designer) has always been a
| God of the Gaps. In the future, I am pretty confident we'll
| figure out the explanations using just the physical laws of
| the universe.
|
| But if the claim also includes 4, then I think it can be
| discarded with a high confidence. We can already observe
| how evolution works at the virus and bacteria level. We
| have found the transitional fossils [0]. The science of
| evolutionary development biology [1] is already giving us
| great insights into how organisms translate the genetic
| code to build our complex bodies. It also shows how the
| same genes have been reused across species (e.g., the genes
| for eyes in the house fly and humans are the same). We
| don't need the Intelligent Design hypothesis to explain
| evolution.
|
| (EDIT: I see from another comment that you already agree to
| the above point.)
|
| The claim Intelligent Design supporters can make at best is
| that God created the first cells, perhaps nudged them a
| little during the Cambrian explosion, and perhaps again
| intervened before the evolution of Homo Sapiens. But all
| the rest happened the boring way, following the natural
| laws.
|
| > we have never seen life come from non life.
|
| Does not imply we never will. Given the countless other
| times this argument has been used to justify an Intelligent
| Creator when we didn't know something, I give very low
| credence to the idea that /this/ time is truly it. Unless
| someone can show mathematically why life cannot possibly
| emerge from the natural laws, naturalism remains the best
| hypothesis.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil [1] h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_bio
| ...
| kens wrote:
| You recommend Behe's book; I read his earlier book
| "Darwin's Black Box"a while back. I found it interesting,
| well-written, and superficially convincing but
| fundamentally flawed and ultimately a waste of time.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Thanks for actually engaging the arguments, do you
| remember what you found fundamentally flawed?
| kens wrote:
| I read "Darwin's Black Box" over 20 years ago so I can't
| give a lot of details. His fundamental idea was
| "irreducible complexity", a system that won't work if you
| take away any piece, such as a mousetrap. He claimed that
| a lot of biological mechanisms were like this. The
| fundamental argument was that something irreducibly
| complex can't be formed by evolution because it won't
| work if is anything missing, so you can't evolve part
| way. E.g. a mousetrap that lacks the spring doesn't work
| at all. Therefore, evolution couldn't create the
| irreducibly complex mechanisms found in biology. QED.
|
| The big flaw that I see is that he looks at the problem
| of creating irreducibly complex mechanisms by addition,
| but they can easily be produced by _subtraction_. As an
| analogy, an arch is irreducibly complex because if you
| take out any stone, it collapses, so you can 't build it
| one stone at a time. But you don't build an arch this
| way. Instead, a support is built and the stones are put
| on top of the support, one at a time. When you take the
| support away, now you have an irreducibly complex
| structure. Similarly with biology, something can evolve
| step by step with redundancy, and then pieces are removed
| by evolution, ending up with an irreducibly complex
| mechanism that Behe views as impossible.
|
| I should reiterate that I read the book decades ago so
| I'm probably wrong on the details of Behe's argument. I
| figured I should answer your question but I'm not
| particularly interested in having a debate on evolution.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Me either just interested in other perspectives, thanks.
| yread wrote:
| More like proof of concept of a buffer overflow vulnerability.
| It's smart but we have no idea what do all these transistors do
| kazinator wrote:
| Yes ... using a copy and paste of seven existing functions,
| knowing what two of them do. Oh, and bootstrapped using a copy
| of an existing execution environment.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| So basically the React tutorial app?
| svachalek wrote:
| It's a 480 line (gene) Hello World. For this to be the minimum
| viable cell, when we don't even know what so many of the genes
| do, would be surprising to me. It would mean pre-cellular life
| somehow gathered these genes or equivalents without the
| benefits a cell provides. Not saying it's impossible, but it
| would be pretty interesting.
| swiley wrote:
| Perhaps "Hello world copy and pasted from StackOverflow."
| tgv wrote:
| More like a quine, isn't it? Pretty impressive.
| tmabraham wrote:
| While this top-down approach (removing unnecessary parts of an
| organism and keeping the essential parts) is really impressive, I
| personally find the bottom-up approach more interesting: building
| an "artificial cell" by adding all the transcription and
| translation machinery into a lipid vesicle, allowing for this
| "artificial cell" to produce proteins to do various tasks. For
| example, people have developed "artificial /synthetic cells" that
| communicate with each other [1] and even bacteria [2]. There has
| also been some recent study on dividing cell-sized lipid vesicles
| with membrane proteins [3]. I know there were some comments about
| science has achieving a biological "Hello World", and I think
| this sort of work is what is going to get us there.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v9/n5/abs/nchem.2644.ht...
|
| [2]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.8b10029
|
| [3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14696-0
| cambalache wrote:
| Meh, if you are not doing the atoms yourself from leptons and
| quarks then I am not interested.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Of course, there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/378/
| kens wrote:
| The approach of removing unnecessary parts from a genome to
| find the minimum brings to mind Muntzing. In the 1940s, Earl
| Muntz was a TV seller who reduced manufacturing costs by
| cutting out unnecessary components. He walked around the lab
| with diagonal cutters and snipped out components until the TV
| stopped working. He'd put the last component back and have a
| new lower-cost design. The TVs only worked in high-signal
| areas, but were much cheaper than the competition and sold a
| ton.
|
| https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/boards/article...
| callesgg wrote:
| What do you mean? Like creating every protin without a
| ribosome? Why would you need to go to that lengths of artfical?
| Seams to like you have to start from the top up in one way or
| another. Starting from the complete bottom just seams over the
| top.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| If you can figure out how to go bottom up, it will result in
| new innovations in microscopic manufacturing methods.
| [deleted]
| callesgg wrote:
| Or... you can just use the top up built cell to manufacture
| things. Why build your own nanorobots when there are pre
| made nanorobots that already works.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Starting from the bottom means, you really did understand it
| all, once completed ..
| callesgg wrote:
| If that is the ultimate purpose and you have a way to
| slowly progress towards full understanding sure.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Oh, I would say many researchers have that goal, but
| probably not many would consider it a realistic goal to
| be achieved in their lifetime ..
|
| (all assumed, biology is not my area)
| tmabraham wrote:
| > Starting from the complete bottom just seams over the top.
| Is it really?
|
| "What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard
| Feynman
|
| And to clarify, currently the ribosomes are provided as part
| of the cell-free transcription/translation system.
| Additionally, amino acids, tRNA (plus tRNA synthetase), RNA
| polymerase, and a primitive energy source (ATP with some
| extra energy in creatine phosphate) are all provided.
|
| Here are the components of the most common cell-free
| transcription/translation systems (PURE):
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nprot.2015.082/tables/1
| laurent92 wrote:
| Yes. Starting from the bottom, we might in the process
| discover that 90%-99% of cell components are
| cruft/inefficient, and discover how to make cells 10 or 100
| times smaller. Imagine being able to inject neurons in the
| brain that are 100 times smaller.
| sizzle wrote:
| Couldn't messing around with these artificial cells expose us
| to the risk of creating some second order mutations in humans
| from accidentally introducing these cells to our microbiome
| from the lab akin to the COVID-19 escaping a 'gain of function'
| virus lab theory?
| pmiller2 wrote:
| It would be extremely unlikely that such an artificial cell
| could colonize humans in any way, and even more unlikely that
| such a cell would be pathogenic.
| stadium wrote:
| Source?
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Look at the proportion of natural cells that can colonize
| humans versus those that can't. Similarly, look at the
| proportion of pathogenic organisms versus non-pathogenic
| organisms. Assuming the _goal_ wasn 't to produce a
| pathogen, I find it unlikely we'd produce one
| accidentally.
| jchrisa wrote:
| If you can create something living by a combination of non
| living parts, I think that would be an interesting first. All
| of the life we know of, presumably has living ancestors. Hence
| the notion of a "spark" of life that is passed on like the
| flame of a torch. If we can create life from raw parts and
| supply the spark ourselves, it increases the relevance of
| science. Suddenly the idea of sending seeds of ecosystems in
| the form of printers and data would become viable.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| We didn't create life from nothing, but we can certainly get
| close.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
| noxer wrote:
| Close? Yeah no, I dont think so. The experiment was
| basically a complete failure. It just happens to be
| interesting to analyses what actually happened and why. Its
| also based on assumed condition on earth that are now
| consider extremely unlikely.
| sliken wrote:
| So grey goo version 0.01?
| stcredzero wrote:
| _We_ are grey goo version 0.0.1!!! That is, life on Earth. Life
| has already become a solar powered self replicator that caused
| a global catastrophe, burying the whole Earth in a toxic gas.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I always get angry about the conservative idea that "It's
| hubris to think humanity is so powerful that we could
| possibly change the whole environment!" (occasionally
| sprinkled with "only god is that powerful")
|
| Guess what? Such simple creatures as an early bacteria did it
| even harder over 2 billion years ago, making the earth nearly
| inhabitable by anything that came before it.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Not all conservatives. There are some who actually advocate
| for a carbon tax.
|
| Also, lots of religious people are socialist as all git-
| out, and some organizations advocate those political
| positions _officially_.
|
| It's easy to hate on the stupid, uninformed conservatives.
| Just like it's easy to hate on the stupid, uninformed
| leftists.
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| Worth pointing out that the parent comment said
| conservative "idea", not conservative people.
| relax88 wrote:
| Eh, this biological grey goo is likely so crappy at surviving
| that it would get snuffed out or out competed by any random
| culture from the bottom of your shoe.
|
| I'd be more concerned about viral gain of function research and
| the weaponization of synthetic biology in general.
| lgats wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
| Freestyler_3 wrote:
| Could they make cells that can regulate, if there is abundance of
| X = do something? I mean that would end a lot of problems.
| Starting with diabetes.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| For that to end diabetes, you'd need to keep the cells in the
| body... which has two difficulties: first, the cells need to be
| protected from the immune system destroying them and second,
| the cells need to find a place in the body to live... and then
| you have to find a way to keep their numbers regulated.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is an interesting result. Basically cellular biologists
| debugging cells the same way folks who don't understand how a
| program works debug it, by chopping parts off until it fails and
| then adding back bits one by one until it works again :-).
|
| At some point, not today and perhaps not in the next 20 years,
| humans will understand exactly how cells and DNA "work" from
| first principles to final behavior. At that point, humans will
| either cease to age and never suffer from disease (Venter would
| have liked that), or humanity will be wiped out by a malicious
| organism that is designed by a deranged practitioner.
|
| Yet another technology produced Lady or the Tiger challenge.
| darkteflon wrote:
| I had to look this up:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady,_or_the_Tiger%3F
| okl wrote:
| There's a fun Smullyan book with that title.
| novaRom wrote:
| We already understand exactly how cells and DNA "work", the
| problem is methabolic networks are very large and hard to
| simulate with sufficient certainty.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's rather the point. Those metabolic networks are not
| meaningfully separable from "how cells and DNA work".
| dooopy wrote:
| Lol what are you talking about
| WalterBright wrote:
| Knowing how something works is not at all the same thing as
| knowing enough to make significant improvements. It's just a
| first step.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| True, but knowing how something works enables you to walk the
| path to learn how to make improvements. It allows you to make
| reasoned changes vs random changes.
| lujim wrote:
| Ahh boy that title. Clicking on the link to probably realize that
| this is totally harmless and my initial reaction is due to how
| much I've been stuck inside for a year.
| dang wrote:
| I've truncated the title to try to make it less baity. If
| anyone wants to suggest a better--i.e. more accurate and
| neutral--title, preferably using representative language from
| the article, we can change it again.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Stunning and beautiful: We are on our way to truly intelligently
| designed life.
| Giorgi wrote:
| So at some point we can just print humans (or better organism)
| making organic life obsolete.
| gulli1010 wrote:
| Are we creating new organisms that can kill us?
| breck wrote:
| Loved the full article, thank you for helping science Elsevier!
|
| 606,520 Americans died of Cancer last year. With your help
| restricting access to information, I bet we can hit 1,000,000 by
| 2030!
|
| /s
|
| #ElsevierSupportsCancer (100% truth)
| f6v wrote:
| > Of the seven genes added to this organism for normal cell
| division, scientists know what only two of them do.
|
| This gives you an appreciation of how little we know. I work in
| bioinformatics, and every one in the field will tell you that
| there's been an explosion in the number of datasets. However, try
| finding recent data on your condition of interest! The number of
| experiments grows incredibly fast, but we're not there yet to
| build a comprehensive model even of a simple organism.
| dnautics wrote:
| so fyi I worked in that lab, we called many of them MUFs
| ("membrane proteins of unknown functions")... We kind of
| suspect that all they do is maintain membrane integrity and
| isotonicity _just by being present_. One easy way for a cell to
| do to increase the yield of a stuff is to have literally more
| genes.
|
| So there are a lot of interesting things to do (which I don't
| know if they did), like instead of having those last five genes
| in there, copying one of those five genes five times...
| azernik wrote:
| > One easy way for a cell to do to increase the yield of a
| stuff is to have literally more genes.
|
| Wat
|
| How does this work? Do they encourage expression of the genes
| that actually make stuff?
| f6v wrote:
| Maybe parent meant that gene duplication (paralogs) results
| in increased gene product.
| dnautics wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying.
| [deleted]
| koeng wrote:
| https://vizbi.org/Posters/Images/2021/vB26.png
|
| They're working towards it :)
| choeger wrote:
| I wonder if this is going to be incredibly useful or totally
| over the top for research. Imagine a development like the
| BioNTech vaccine. With an atomic-resolution cell simulator,
| you could verify your mRNA code, including the delivery into
| the cell itself and watch it perform.
|
| But would that be like watching my CPU decode and fetch
| instructions, interesting but completely useless for most
| practical applications, or like a debugger introspecting a
| running process, an incredible useful tool?
| akiselev wrote:
| _> But would that be like watching my CPU decode and fetch
| instructions, interesting but completely useless for most
| practical applications, or like a debugger introspecting a
| running process, an incredible useful tool?_
|
| It would be like watching the cloud of electrons moving
| over transistors across an entire chip, without the benefit
| of knowing quantum mechanics. Except in this analogy,
| everyone is in the same boat and working on a single
| codebase that's the surviving vestige of billions of years
| of "just good enough" coders fighting it out, so every
| little bit helps.
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