4 ms·

> often only about one bacterium in 10 million will gain a spacer that lets it defend itself. Incredible... The scale and probabilities involved in these proce

by epberry 10y ago

> often only about one bacterium in 10 million will gain a spacer that lets it defend itself. Incredible... The scale and probabilities involved in these processes are mind blowing. In general I liked this article because it posed a few open ended research questions and explained why they were relevant. As someone who barely knows the difference between a bacteria and a virus I felt it was pretty understandable.

woliveirajr 10y ago
> "There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil" [1] That would mean 4 in each gram of soil, if Wikipedia is correct. Bacteria scale is so disproportional to what we deal in daily basis that I'm pretty sure we know almost 0.01% of all existing species, families or any other kind of grouping them you like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria
- edge17 10y ago
  These types of probabilities are all over the place though. Even in chips with a billion transistors or more we have to design redundancy because manufacturing at that scale isn't perfect. Imagine there's a 1 in 10 million chance of some sort of manufacturing defect on some modern processor; you're pretty much guaranteed 100 defects.
- problems 10y ago
  The amount of knowledge we lack with regards to species still surprises me. We can do pretty well with plants and animals, but we don't even have good genetic analysis on types of mushrooms that grow on the surface, picking up any field guide often results in "this looks quite like it, but the ones from this part of the world make people sick and we don't actually know if they're related".
  - toufka 10y ago
    We really don't have a good grasp even on the variety of plants and animals. We do know a lot about the foundations of each organism's genetics, but we're just now peeking into their variation. And that is precisely why you see biotech starting to get interesting and useful above and beyond basic discovery. When we start looking not just for 'how life works', but for 'how does it glow', 'how does it climb', 'how does it live so long', we start getting pretty cool answers. But we're JUST starting. Much of what know comes from a short list of organisms (that can grown in lab conditions). There is a 'model organism' [1] for the simplest organism (that can grown in lab) for each step up the ladder of biological complexity (towards humans). - bacteria : E coli - eukaryote : yeast - multi-cellular : nematode - plant : arabidopsis - nervous system : fruit fly - spinal cord : zebrafish - mammal : mouse - primate : monkey There are definitely others (sorry for leaving out your favorite model...), but in general, we know a lot about these model organisms. And that covers a wide gamut, but still we know very little specifics about everything in between. Further, because we've been so focused on (funding) human health, we know a lot about how humans work. But what we've missed is all the ancillary tech that could be used to support human health, or human society/technology/industry at large. CRISPR proteins (and its similar tech) which will end up revolutionizing our biological tehcnology come from non-human-like, and otherwise unfundable hobby research. PCR/GFP all came from looking at weird things and saying, "that's cool, how does that work?" not "I want to cure cancer". It's hard to get funding to study how various bacteria battle each other in the soil when you cannot know how it might affect human health... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_organism
    - spynxic 10y ago
      > that's cool, how does that work?" not "I want to cure cancer" With regards to your final note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design

by epberry 10y ago

woliveirajr 10y ago

> "There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil" [1] That would mean 4 in each gram of soil, if Wikipedia is correct. Bacteria scale is so disproportional to what we deal in daily basis that I'm pretty sure we know almost 0.01% of all existing species, families or any other kind of grouping them you like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria

edge17 10y ago
These types of probabilities are all over the place though. Even in chips with a billion transistors or more we have to design redundancy because manufacturing at that scale isn't perfect. Imagine there's a 1 in 10 million chance of some sort of manufacturing defect on some modern processor; you're pretty much guaranteed 100 defects.
problems 10y ago
The amount of knowledge we lack with regards to species still surprises me. We can do pretty well with plants and animals, but we don't even have good genetic analysis on types of mushrooms that grow on the surface, picking up any field guide often results in "this looks quite like it, but the ones from this part of the world make people sick and we don't actually know if they're related".
- toufka 10y ago
  We really don't have a good grasp even on the variety of plants and animals. We do know a lot about the foundations of each organism's genetics, but we're just now peeking into their variation. And that is precisely why you see biotech starting to get interesting and useful above and beyond basic discovery. When we start looking not just for 'how life works', but for 'how does it glow', 'how does it climb', 'how does it live so long', we start getting pretty cool answers. But we're JUST starting. Much of what know comes from a short list of organisms (that can grown in lab conditions). There is a 'model organism' [1] for the simplest organism (that can grown in lab) for each step up the ladder of biological complexity (towards humans). - bacteria : E coli - eukaryote : yeast - multi-cellular : nematode - plant : arabidopsis - nervous system : fruit fly - spinal cord : zebrafish - mammal : mouse - primate : monkey There are definitely others (sorry for leaving out your favorite model...), but in general, we know a lot about these model organisms. And that covers a wide gamut, but still we know very little specifics about everything in between. Further, because we've been so focused on (funding) human health, we know a lot about how humans work. But what we've missed is all the ancillary tech that could be used to support human health, or human society/technology/industry at large. CRISPR proteins (and its similar tech) which will end up revolutionizing our biological tehcnology come from non-human-like, and otherwise unfundable hobby research. PCR/GFP all came from looking at weird things and saying, "that's cool, how does that work?" not "I want to cure cancer". It's hard to get funding to study how various bacteria battle each other in the soil when you cannot know how it might affect human health... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_organism
  - spynxic 10y ago
    > that's cool, how does that work?" not "I want to cure cancer" With regards to your final note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design