Computational Genomics

blamanj writes "Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have been using computational techniques to 'reverse engineer' the DNA of extinct species. David Haussler and colleagues created a hypothetical portion of ancestral mammalian DNA and let a computer model simulate the process of evolution. Then they made their algorithm work backward from these descendants, to see if it could recreate the original ancestor."

Comments

98 percent?

[kureido]

From the article: "Then they made their algorithm work backward from these descendants, to see if it could recreate the original ancestor. The ancestor the algorithm came up with had a sequence that was 98% accurate..."

Human and chimpanzee DNA are about 98% similar, too. In that context, 98% similarity doesn't seem that impressive. Maybe someone needs to invent a new benchmark for sequence comparison for species that are already similar?

Algorithm testing.

[Fortran IV]

The process is interesting, but their description of how they tested their algorithm is less than confidence-inspiring.

• 1. 1) Manually create a set of hypothetical data.
  1. 2) Run a mathematical algorithm to generate new data.
  1. 3) Run the converse of the algorithm on the generated data.

If an algorithm is truly reversable then, without the necessary randomization, such a process is likely to generate the original data with 100% accuracy. I'd have felt much better if they'd run two independent algorithms against each other: create descendants with ForwardA() and extract ancestors with BackwardB(), then do the same thing with ForwardB() and BackwardA().

Planet seeding

[Associate]

Once we get things like this under control along with teraforming, we can seed barren planets. We can walk the universe like gods. Probably have to kick the old one's out first.