3 ms·
Once you have mastered the top-down ("is this really the minimum? Or is it a local minimum?") approach, then you could attempt to bottom-up with an end product
by at_a_remove 6y ago
Once you have mastered the top-down ("is this really the minimum? Or is it a local minimum?") approach, then you could attempt to bottom-up with an end product very firmly in mind. This way, you could skip aiming for parts that you might have thought required which were in reality redundant, or secure the existence of a piece you had once thought superfluous.
After you had bottom-upped a few times, one might even try to figure out a necessary order for the steps and possibly gain some more insight into evolution that way.
- restalis 6y agoAs all engineering, it boils down to requirements. Mycoplasmata, from which JCVI-syn3A has been developed, is reported to "survive without oxygen", which means that it's not necessarily a "pure" anaerobic organism. We must assume that there has to be an existing mechanism that protects this bacteria from highly reactive oxygen. If the design requirements don't include surviving the natural environment, then that is one of probably many more areas to trim genetic "fat" from. However, I don't know much about their work on synthetic bacteria nor the environment used for it, so it's possible that the aforementioned mechanism to be already removed from its genes.