4 ms·

I think a better analogy is that CRISPR (Cas9) is the cursor package within the text editor. The (nearly completed) genomic text editor is the the entire suite

by jfarlow 10y ago

I think a better analogy is that CRISPR (Cas9) is the cursor package within the text editor. The (nearly completed) genomic text editor is the the entire suite of biological technologies we have at our disposal. Copy/Cut/Paste have been around a long time and made these discoveries possible. Rendering has been around for quite a while. Keyboards have permitted larger buffers to be written. But until recently a non-random, arbitrarily positionable cursor has been missing. Cas9 is importantly, and just, that piece of the suite.

dnautics 10y ago
this analogy breaks down: A non-random, arbitrarily positionable cursor is available in pretty much all lower organisms. CRISPR, for example, is totally useless for yeast (because the effort to get it to work far outweighs "just add addressed DNA" which is basically "how it works" for yeast). CRISPR is really only spectacularly useful for higher organisms and higher organism derived cell lines. There may be a limit to that for genes where there's high copy number (often a problem in plants). Als; CRISPR can specifically induce a strand break (which is the FIRST step), but it is not quantitative, nor does it do selection. Generally as a part of a CRISPR protocol you have to counterselect for cells which have the DNA integration in them. There is quite literally no computer science analogy to this. This would be like having editing a database that is sharded and replicated over multiple servers, randomly integrating the change you want on some (probably small) fraction of the servers, and then going through, scanning all database replicates for the existence of the change, and physically destroying with a hammer the servers that had shards that were unchanged, as the mechanism to insure eventual consistency across your database.

4 ms·

I think a better analogy is that CRISPR (Cas9) is the cursor package within the text editor. The (nearly completed) genomic text editor is the the entire suite

by jfarlow 10y ago

dnautics 10y ago
this analogy breaks down: A non-random, arbitrarily positionable cursor is available in pretty much all lower organisms. CRISPR, for example, is totally useless for yeast (because the effort to get it to work far outweighs "just add addressed DNA" which is basically "how it works" for yeast). CRISPR is really only spectacularly useful for higher organisms and higher organism derived cell lines. There may be a limit to that for genes where there's high copy number (often a problem in plants). Als; CRISPR can specifically induce a strand break (which is the FIRST step), but it is not quantitative, nor does it do selection. Generally as a part of a CRISPR protocol you have to counterselect for cells which have the DNA integration in them. There is quite literally no computer science analogy to this. This would be like having editing a database that is sharded and replicated over multiple servers, randomly integrating the change you want on some (probably small) fraction of the servers, and then going through, scanning all database replicates for the existence of the change, and physically destroying with a hammer the servers that had shards that were unchanged, as the mechanism to insure eventual consistency across your database.