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Computation: “What excited us most is that we could see the green spots – the i-motifs – appearing and disappearing over time, so we know that they are forming,
by isthatart 8y ago
Computation: “What excited us most is that we could see the green spots – the i-motifs – appearing and disappearing over time, so we know that they are forming, dissolving and forming again,” says Dr Mahdi Zeraati, whose research underpins the study’s findings.
- bitL 8y agoHooray! Finally the inevitable happened! I guess this will turn biology upside down, everybody assumed DNA/RNA were static (with the exception of some primitive viruses). Now how to reverse engineer "machine code"?
- dekhn 8y agothis doesn't turn biology upside down in any way.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoThis amuses me. When was the last time any major finding turned an entire mature field of study on its head?
- dekhn 8y agoI don't understand. Are you implying this paper is a "major finding"? Many things that happen in biology occur without any real meaning or utility.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoNo, I'm agreeing with you. I think it rare that any mature field these days is "turned on its head". I doubt most of the examples given by other comments would qualify if you dig into them.
- dekhn 8y agoA good example would be induced pluripotent stem cells nobody thought that that can happen but once it was obvious that you just needed a few transcription factors to move cells from state-to-state. Completely trans formed a field that was already mature
- dekhn 8y agoAnother example would be the discovery that the ECM (extracellular matrix) plays a huge role in cellular development. Completely unrecognized until experiments done by Mina Bissel's lab opened up an entirely new field in cellular biology.
- dekhn 8y agoSuperresolution microscopy. It blew through a long-standing limitation- the best resolution was determined by the wavelength of light passing through a lens. That and other recent discoveries in microscopy like light-sheet microscopy have turned microscopy on its head.
- isthatart 8y agoBy using lambda calculus, interaction nets, something equivalent, is my guess.
- subroutine 8y agoFor what exactly? What specifically do you mean by "computation", above?
- isthatart 8y agoI mean by that a model of computation in the TCS sense. (Some) molecules, be them DNA, RNA or other, are akin to lambda terms (or graphs), beta reduction (or other graph rewrites) are akin to chemical reactions. The algorithm of reduction has to be random, local (i.e. no higher point of view criteria for interaction are used), performed by Nature. All in all, to be able to prove that some part of the biochemistry can be seen, as a concrete asynchronous graph rewrite automaton (capable of universal computation) would be a great advance in biology.
- dekhn 8y agoI'm not sure why that would be the case. First, I think most smart people already recognize that sufficiently complex biochemical systems can in fact perform computation as well as other abstract operations. Second, there is already a ton of literature in this area, it's often very helpful to analyze biological data from the perspective of various graph and sequence rewrite automata, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the underlying biology is explicitly exploiting matter at that level. Third, I don't see why having any such "proof" (to the extent that you can prove anything about biological systems anyway) would be an advance. What new predictions would you be able make?
- isthatart 8y agoThis and the references https://figshare.com/articles/Chemlambda_strings/5751318 https://figshare.com/articles/Chemlambda_strings/5751318