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By nature, we understand the "what' and "why' of each supercomputer component, as they have been built by us from the bottom up. We are orders of magnitude from
by vibrio 8y ago
By nature, we understand the "what' and "why' of each supercomputer component, as they have been built by us from the bottom up. We are orders of magnitude from understanding each component of the cell. When you get into the weeds, the methods used to dissect these processes are generally slow, indirectly and subject to relatively subjective interpretation and poor reproducablility (vs chemistry or physics). Don't get me wrong, I love this stuff and was drawn to a molecular biology career by curiosity around the wide grey line that separates what is living and what is a bag of molecules, but having spend many years at the bench still think that the Biology part of Synthetic Biology will be the bottleneck rather than the bioinformatics/synthetic methods, tho improvements in this stuff will greatly help.
- johnwyles 8y agoExactly. Look at the computational power we have thrown into figuring out just how a protein folds for example. I worked in a lab where we used a lot of inference in the 2D structure of RNA over a decade ago after the 23s and 16s ribosomes tertiary structures were resolved. I was simply working with 70-120 base-pair tRNAs and that alone was computationally complex using a known model to compare against! We have still but scratched the surface. Building a core cell always intrigued me as an undergraduate and I was often interested in the bare minimum (DNA-wise) lab manufactured bacterial strains that were used in experiments.