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My understanding seems to be at conflict with how I'm reading your description here. Please help me out? DNA is comprised of four specific nucleic acids which
by bdg 13y ago
My understanding seems to be at conflict with how I'm reading your description here. Please help me out?
DNA is comprised of four specific nucleic acids which are always the same molecular combination. These acids form into base-pairs which must always be some combination of those four acids.
The DNA itself cannot be 'written to' as if it stores information no less than the following string x = "ACGTACT" can contain additional information beyond those bytes already stored in the string. We could alter the DNA, just as we can alter the string x, but this isn't writing additional data to the binary values, but changing what's stored in those memory locations.
When we're talking about reading/wrting to the DNA, are we actually speaking about modifying the sequence of any given strand, thus "reading/writing to DNA" is a misnomer ? I know there are presently ways to produce DNA synthetically, but what you've said seems to indicate there's room here for any pre-defined sequence I print to end up doing different things in a cloned cell than their synthetic duplicates might.
- Renaud 13y agoTo cite Kwikipedia on the Epignetics article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics [Epigenetics] refers to functionally relevant modifications to the genome that do not involve a change in the nucleotide sequence. There was an eye opening documentary on the subject produced by BBC Horizon a few years ago: The Ghost in your Genes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehwFVgQ82ZY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehwFVgQ82ZY
- bdg 13y agoThis is very cool, thank you for sharing. I've been on-and-off involved in some synthetic biology FOSS software, but as a non-biologist so much of this is hard to keep up with and make informed decisions about.
- dnautics 13y agowhat's the FOSS software you're involved with? My synthetic biology nonprofit would be very interested.
- new299 13y agoThe "epigenetics" they're talking about is the chemical modification of the DNA. So while we usually talk about sequences of A,T,G,C we've actually got an additional symbol e.g. M. Which might be "methylated C". So, these "base modifications" are actually increasing the alphabet size, you have the normal A,T,G,C bases and then a set of modified bases. >I know there are presently ways to produce DNA synthetically, but what you've said seems to indicate there's room here for any pre-defined sequence I print to end up doing different things in a cloned cell than their synthetic duplicates might. yes, or they might get modified so they are similar to the sequences already present.