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Seriously what is the point of this other than novelty? Why would you throw out billions of years of biochemistry and evolution? Is the expressive power evidenc

Seriously what is the point of this other than novelty? Why would you throw out billions of years of biochemistry and evolution? Is the expressive power evidenced in all of life not good enough?

swamp40 8y ago
Mankind has always striven to understand his universe. You don't really understand something until you can tear it down and rebuild it in a hundred different ways.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  This is like suggesting we need to rebuild computing to use ternary, and somehow it will help us.
virusduck 8y ago
There is productive research into using DNA as a data storage medium. I could see this being used to either increase data density or as an error-correction mechanism.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  DNA gets its fidelity from the machinery that maintains it, i.e. chromatin, repair enzymes, polymerases, topoisomerases. All of these evolved around the idosyncracies of the genetic code and have perfected themselves over billions of years - more if you count all of the lives of individual organisms put together. Now you want to break that basis and somehow think you will improve things? As for increasing data density, again, do you suggest converting computers to ternary to do the same?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
twanvl 8y ago
No one is talking about "throwing out billions of years of biochemistry". Rather, by changing a small part of biochemistry we will be better able to understand it. Not all research is about making something better. Artificial bases might help us understand why live evolved the way it did. Maybe there is an interaction between the bases and the way DNA folds? Or were ACTG just an accident? Artificial bases might be useful as part of other techniques, perhaps for tagging DNA sequences. Maybe they can one day be used to disrupt or alter certain biological processes. I am not a biologists, so I have no idea if that makes any sense, but the research is interesting.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  I am a biologist. We already know many of the things you asked. For example, the stacking energy between bases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/ All this can be studied with some chemistry. These people are engineering new organisms with a new genetic code and new amino acids. It goes far beyond mere study. It's as if someone suddenly said, "Yes, but imagine if pianos had 99 keys!"
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    This seems analogous to: "No one will ever need a 100 megabyte drive!" "No one could ever use a 1 megabit network connection!" "No one will ever use more than 256 megabytes of RAM!" But I don't know enough biology to understand if that's the case.
    - falsedan 8y ago
      This is more like: "no one will need gold audio cables!" "No one could ever tell the display refresh rate was 1kHz!" "No one will ever use a mineral oil bath to cool their PC!"
      - drilldrive 8y ago
        Gold audio cables are useless, yes? I assume the other two are just as such then, if that is the analogy you are shooting for.
koeng 8y ago
There are lots of reasons. For one, expanding the genetic code would allow new and interesting structures in RNAs, would allow massive expansion of amino acid coding sets, different evolution paths based on codon usage, etc. Generally in synthetic biology we want to build new systems from scratch, and these base pairs are a wonderful step in humanity defining life instead of life defining humanity.

Seriously what is the point of this other than novelty? Why would you throw out billions of years of biochemistry and evolution? Is the expressive power evidenced in all of life not good enough?

swamp40 8y ago

Mankind has always striven to understand his universe. You don't really understand something until you can tear it down and rebuild it in a hundred different ways.

astazangasta 8y ago
This is like suggesting we need to rebuild computing to use ternary, and somehow it will help us.

virusduck 8y ago

There is productive research into using DNA as a data storage medium. I could see this being used to either increase data density or as an error-correction mechanism.

astazangasta 8y ago
DNA gets its fidelity from the machinery that maintains it, i.e. chromatin, repair enzymes, polymerases, topoisomerases. All of these evolved around the idosyncracies of the genetic code and have perfected themselves over billions of years - more if you count all of the lives of individual organisms put together. Now you want to break that basis and somehow think you will improve things? As for increasing data density, again, do you suggest converting computers to ternary to do the same?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

twanvl 8y ago

No one is talking about "throwing out billions of years of biochemistry". Rather, by changing a small part of biochemistry we will be better able to understand it. Not all research is about making something better. Artificial bases might help us understand why live evolved the way it did. Maybe there is an interaction between the bases and the way DNA folds? Or were ACTG just an accident? Artificial bases might be useful as part of other techniques, perhaps for tagging DNA sequences. Maybe they can one day be used to disrupt or alter certain biological processes. I am not a biologists, so I have no idea if that makes any sense, but the research is interesting.

astazangasta 8y ago
I am a biologist. We already know many of the things you asked. For example, the stacking energy between bases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/ All this can be studied with some chemistry. These people are engineering new organisms with a new genetic code and new amino acids. It goes far beyond mere study. It's as if someone suddenly said, "Yes, but imagine if pianos had 99 keys!"
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  This seems analogous to: "No one will ever need a 100 megabyte drive!" "No one could ever use a 1 megabit network connection!" "No one will ever use more than 256 megabytes of RAM!" But I don't know enough biology to understand if that's the case.
  - falsedan 8y ago
    This is more like: "no one will need gold audio cables!" "No one could ever tell the display refresh rate was 1kHz!" "No one will ever use a mineral oil bath to cool their PC!"
    - drilldrive 8y ago
      Gold audio cables are useless, yes? I assume the other two are just as such then, if that is the analogy you are shooting for.

koeng 8y ago

There are lots of reasons. For one, expanding the genetic code would allow new and interesting structures in RNAs, would allow massive expansion of amino acid coding sets, different evolution paths based on codon usage, etc. Generally in synthetic biology we want to build new systems from scratch, and these base pairs are a wonderful step in humanity defining life instead of life defining humanity.