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If I had done synthetic biology my goal would have been to create cells that could reliably compute sine waves... by digitally computing taylor series polynomia
by dekhn 4y ago
If I had done synthetic biology my goal would have been to create cells that could reliably compute sine waves... by digitally computing taylor series polynomial approximations. Turns out engineering digital systems from cells is a remarkably challenging problem.
Examples of "switches" in biology abound, my favorite simple one is the Mating Type of Yeast: yeast have two sex types, and swap a small region of DNA in-place with variants to switch between them. Perfect example of self-modifying code!
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y agoNot sure about polynomials, but how about "Genetic Regulatory Networks that count to 3" [1]. One of the interesting, counter-intuitive highlights from the paper: "Counting to 2 requires very different network design than counting to 3." [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23567648 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23567648
- dekhn 4y agoUnfortunately, that's entirely analog. my goal was to do digital computing- with all the reliability and predictability.