3 ms·
> throwing away all the non-mutated locations in the genome because they carry no meaningful information How can they claim this with certainty? Maybe the cont
by longtom 7y ago
> throwing away all the non-mutated locations in the genome because they carry no meaningful information
How can they claim this with certainty? Maybe the context of any given mutation contains useful information similar to how a word embedding vector contains useful information such as relatedness to other words etc.
- mschuster91 7y agoThe non-differing parts are worthless as you are looking for differences. For example, take a group of five people with highly sensitive hearing and a hundred people with normal hearing. You don't care what the sensitives have together with the normals, you care about if you can find a mutation present in all sensitives but in none of the normals. Therefore it makes sense to only look at the differences and throw away the equal parts, you just waste computational resources.
- longtom 7y agoBut isn't genetic code transcribed sequentially and in the context of previously decoded structures? So it is similar to reading a text that references parts elsewhere in the text. If you only keep the changes between multiple subtly mutated texts, then it becomes an enigma what these changes actually mean and, what's worse, the changes are now in context of nearby changes which may make create completely different meanings.