[HN Gopher] Engineering of human cells reveals genome's resilien...
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       Engineering of human cells reveals genome's resilience to
       structural changes
        
       Author : PaulHoule
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2025-02-15 12:04 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (phys.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
        
       | rolisz wrote:
       | Reminds me of Michael Levin's work, where they found that
       | planaria look the same regardless of how you screw around with
       | their genetic material.
        
       | tomxor wrote:
       | Not a biochemist... But, isn't there a problem with test coverage
       | here? "cells in a dish" is not a full organism which requires
       | cell differentiation, where more specific genes are expressed?
       | 
       | Isn't some genetic code also conditional and expressed under
       | different external pressures? Kind of like how you can delete or
       | break (within syntactically correct changes) huge portions of
       | code in the Linux kernel and still have it build and run fine
       | locally.. because they are featured you don't happen to be using
       | right now or are device drivers for hardware you are not
       | currently running.
        
         | PaulHoule wrote:
         | Good point. A condition like autism or schizotypy might not be
         | about "the way your cells work right now" but rather about how
         | your brain was wired during development and what a drug or gene
         | therapy could do now is limited.
         | 
         | Still on some level, cells have a basic 'operating system' of
         | genes that are involved in everyday metabolism and cell
         | replication, then there are genes involved in development and
         | there are also genes that certain cells use to do their special
         | work. Genes related to development can be somewhat tested with
         | methods like
         | 
         | https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9310295/
        
         | lp2 wrote:
         | [one of the authors of the two studies] Absolutely spot on -
         | there would likely be more issues if the cells were forced to
         | develop from a single cell to a full blown organism. However,
         | thinking of it as a smoke test, it can still be surprising that
         | such large stretches of DNA are dispensable and the cells
         | survive and propagate!
        
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