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The Biggest Piece Of DNA Ever Made
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes has a story on 'the biggest piece of artificial DNA ever made'. The real story is that companies are racing to produce longer and longer DNA fragments to serve the growing science of synthetic biology." From the article: "On a piece of DNA as long as the one made for Microbia, ten or more genes may be present. By studying more than one gene at once, researchers hope to get a better picture of how they work in concert to produce an organism. Another advantage: These stretches can also be made to contain all the DNA letters that occur between genes. Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk, but many now believe it may regulate how the genes work or provide some other function."
How about "bases" or "base pairs"? Are they creating a string, or DNA? Granted, Forbes ain't a science rag, but still...let's show our readers we took some high school biology.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Ah, "junk" in biology.
There was a piece of the brain that was once thought of as "junk", or "filler", until it was removed by a zealous neurosurgeon during an operation in that region of the brain of his patient. The patient unexpectedly lost the ability to learn new things (as in Memento)... Now we know.
The pancreas was once though to serve simply as a support structure for the more obvious organs...
Beware the tendency of the very litterate to dismiss that which they do not understand, it's simple hubris.
My not-supported-by-resasearch-of-any-kind take on "junk" DNA?
I think it's stored evolution.
DNA that isn't expressed, but stored in a way that it can mutate for generations and generations before being randomly reactivated, cueing natural selection. That would result in a simple mutation (only the reactivation of a chunk of stored DNA) with not-so-simple results from generations of stored changes.
You can't take the sky from me...
A friend once got told size doesn't matter, it's what you do with your DNA. Yeah..it was a friend...nothing to do with me. I'm lucky if I don't trip over my DNA.
!sig
You know, I bet if we unravelled that sucker,
It'd roll all the way down to Fargo, North Dakota
'Cause it's the biggest DNA in Minnesota
I'm talkin' 'bout the biggest DNA in Minnesota
- with apologies to Weird Al Yankovic, Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota
>Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk, but many now believe it may regulate how the genes work or provide some other function.
To clarify: a stretch of DNA that actually gets turned into RNA and thence into proteins is an exon, and the DNA that lives between exons is called an intron. It's been known for a long time that there are sequences before an exon that control it: regulators, promotors, and repressors, that are activated or deactivated by proteins binding to them during DNA reading, and in some cases there are sections of DNA that are processed into RNA, that help stabilize the RNA and are then clipped out before the RNA becomes protein, so they also have a function. (This is part of the reason that making insulin artificially has been tricky: you can't just stick the DNA into a bacterium and have it crank out insulin because the DNA is in a couple sections and requires post-processing.)
Also, many of the introns contain echoes of old sequences that used to be useful way back when, and aren't anymore, or bits of viruses that integrated into the genome hundreds or thousands of generations ago and are now widely spread in the population, and some intron bits are designed to facilitate shuffling of chunks of DNA into different orders for proteins that come in a wide variety of flavors with the same start and end sequences. Antibodies, for instance, have long, consistent, identical start and end chunks with wildly variable center chunks. (Think of a key, with differing teeth to fit various locks, but the same end piece, to fit your hand. Likewise an antibody has a hypervariable section that, for each antibody, can adhere to precisely one antigen, and a nonvariable section that signals passing cells that it has/hasn't found any of that antigen.)
Getting to go play around and make any set of repressor/promoter sequences and change the distances between them is a really nice tool, and being able to make massive sequences like this, helps play with gene interactions and with massive proteins like antibodies. Think of this as the beginnings of the transition from transistors to integrated chips, or maybe it'd be more apt to say from single computers to the beginnings of networks.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
...a rude awakening for those who PLAY God without KNOWING God.
Alright, I'll bite. Who are you to assume the scientists involved in these projects don't know God? Science, for many, is driven by the desire to better understand His creations (I'm talking studying evolution here, not non-science fundie jibberish). Experimenting and testing is a great way to learn things. I'm not saying that's the only reason to learn things, but you've made an unfair and pointed assumption and I just felt I had to call you on it.
Isn't it time to stop talking about "junk DNA" as being junk? The idea that it might not be junk has been popular in the popular science press for decades now. Presumably the idea that it's useful has been around for much longer in academia. Every single article I have ever read in the last decade that mentions the stuff points out that it might serve a purpose. So isn't it time to stop saying "Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk" just like you no longer have to preface every discussion about relativity with the statement "people used to think there was an absolute zero velocity with respect to which the aether was at rest". It's kind of insulting, don't you think?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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All references to God, a deity or higher power, or any aspect of the so-called theory of evolution are not meant as an endorsement or denial of any particular religious belief, save Scientology. After all, I read L. Ron's other books and I didn't believe any of them either...
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
Here's some DNA that's 6" big:
http://www.bathsheba.com/crystal/dna/big.html
If that's too big for you, they also have:
http://www.bathsheba.com/crystal/dna/
There IS going to be a day of reckoning, a rude awakening, and I know because MY day of awakening already came and went.
Ironically enough, your day of awakening was based on your demonstrably flawed sense perception. And if we accept that even logic is faith-based, why does it make a bit of difference if you or Kant use said logic to posit the existence of a god?
Furthermore, Kant's supposition is that morality has Meaning with a capital M. He started with the premise that humans have some inherent sense of morality. I think morality has meaning in some sense, but it's born of a complicated mixture of sociological and biological influences. So complicated that we can never know if it's deterministic or a product of free-will. So the acceptance of even that supposition is faith-based.
Finally, even if I accept that morality has Meaning and that there's some higher power governing said meaning, why am I taken necessarily to the existence of a god in anything close to the christian sense, let alone Jesus? If you say that it's just something that you "feel" once you get there, then we might as well abandon all the arguments we've made, because we've just pinned them all on a highly contested, individual perception. Which is fine, as far as universal belief systems go, but sort of pointless to argue. In science we draw conclusions from collective sense perception, things that humanity as a whole can see and verify for themselves. There is a large consensus on things like "the Rocky Mountains exist" and "this sensor dial reads 91 degrees," but for every "I found Jesus" I can point you to a "praise Allah" or even a "hail satan."
It is a bit disquieting to abandon Truth with a capital T for some sort of evolving truth based on statistical sense perception, but if you look at it, disagreement on physical reality barely ever happens when you get a group of people together and ask them to focus their senses on something at the same time. In memory things are a bit more fluid, but the fact that there's so much agreement leads me to believe that physical reality exists for humans in every reasonable sense. If there is no physical reality, either I've conjured it all up in my head (and therefore all my observations are by default correct), or I'm describing another reality that's experienced in a hallucination en masse by humanity. Either way this reality might as well be physical reality, because it's indistinguishable from it in every way.