[HN Gopher] Even a Single Bacterial Cell Can Sense the Seasons C...
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Even a Single Bacterial Cell Can Sense the Seasons Changing
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 24 points
Date : 2024-10-13 14:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| loa_in_ wrote:
| The seasonal state machine
| tomohelix wrote:
| From an engineering perspective, a single bacterium is a state of
| the art self contained factory. It has thousands or even ten of
| thousands of feeback circuits each with multiple interweaving
| depdendencies that somehow works perfectly to adjust
| inputs/outputs on the fly at extreme efficiency.
|
| Even with all of our technological achievements, we can barely
| build something at this level of complexity. And to make it so
| cheaply and quickly? Pure science fiction. Yet scoop up a handful
| of dirt or pour a glass of water and you can get billions of
| these sophisticated machines in your hand.
|
| Earth and its biosphere is a marvel of technology. Shame we don't
| seem to appreciate it enough.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| We're getting there
|
| The transistor based direction may be folly, but it will get
| close. All within 100 years passed vacuum tubes.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| The bacteria in dirt don't do what I want, though. that's the
| great value of man-made machines, they (typically) do what I
| want (except cars)
| drdaeman wrote:
| > And to make it so cheaply and quickly? Pure science fiction.
|
| Don't scientists out there very explicitly avoid building self-
| replicating systems at any significant scale to avoid the
| associated risks?
|
| I think they already can create artificial/synthetic lifeforms
| in a lab - it's just that there are not a lot of use cases that
| make building a factory worth it, at least so far.
|
| [Upd: I stand corrected - I thought they can, but turns out
| they can't. Thank y'all.]
| tomohelix wrote:
| We use synthetic biology to modify what is already available
| in nature and then call it "synthetic lifeforms" but it is
| like a cheap knockoff of the original with barely functional
| system.
|
| All of these "synthetic lifeforms" I have seen are usually
| very gimped and nowhere as robust as a normal bacteria. It is
| still an ongoing effort to make a real, designed from
| scratch, comparable bacteria that can match the original. But
| speaking as someone who worked on these things, I would not
| expect any major breakthrough soon.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| We can't. You are far overestimating the state of the art.
|
| The only self-replicating thing we can "build" is a modified
| biological cell and that's already a tremendous achievement.
| jl6 wrote:
| No, we cannot already create artificial lifeforms, and the
| reason we don't create self-replicating systems is because we
| don't know how (unless you mean something like modifying
| viruses, but that's not really us doing the hard part).
|
| It would be nice to think that a scientist in command of
| self-replicating artificial life technology will have the
| restraint to hold back on deploying it at scale. But if
| someone comes along and says "hey I made an artificial
| bacterium that can eat all the CO2 in the atmosphere, want me
| to replicate it globally?", someone is going to push the
| button.
| dekhn wrote:
| The closest thing I can think of in biology would be
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html and
| https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.328.5981.958
| (same underlying research, two popular science articles). It
| still depended on many different known biological components,
| tools, and starting points.
|
| In non-biology, most of the work has been self-assembling,
| not self-replication. IE, put all the puzzle piecees in a
| bag, jiggle for long enough, and you get a fully assembled
| puzzle out.
|
| There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot
|
| Realistically, many scientists are working towards fully
| self-replicating machines. Generally, nobody has been able to
| articulate a realistic danger that is not highly implausible;
| we work under the assumption either nothing bad will happen,
| or we'll be able to stop it well before it's an issue.
| echelon wrote:
| > Earth and its biosphere is a marvel of technology.
|
| Our world is exceedingly rare and beautiful.
|
| We lucked into an incredible solar system configuration, and
| evolution has done some seriously heavy lifting.
|
| The molecular biology of DNA alone -- its biochemistry and
| enzymatic machinery -- is enough to be its own field.
|
| > Shame we don't seem to appreciate it enough.
|
| The domain experts do. This complexity is very difficult to
| teach to laypeople and those not interested in science
| communication. It's so easy to take it all for granted. You
| have to develop an understanding first in order to appreciate
| the marvel of biology.
|
| Communication is getting easier, though. I'm sure we'll get
| there.
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