DNA So Dangerous It Doesn't Exist

Panaqqa writes "A group of researchers at Boise State University is investigating the theory that there are genome sequences so dangerous they are incompatible with life. Greg Hampikian, a professor of genetics, and his team are comparing all possible short sequences of nucleotides to databases of gene sequences to determine which ones don't exist in nature. The New Scientist reports that the US Department of Defense is interested enough in their work to have awarded them a $1 million grant. I for one am not sure I like the possible directions this research could take."

Comments

A million dollars??

[teslar]

From TFA:

To do this, Hampikian and his colleage Tim Anderson, also at Boise, have developed software that calculates all the possible sequences of nucleotides - the "letters" of DNA - up to a certain length, and then scans sequence databases such as the US National Institutes of Health's Genbank to identify the smallest sequences that aren't present.

So, basically, it's one regexp and a database lookup. Which is fine (how else would you do it?) but all this requires is one afternoon of PhD time followed by a lot of computer crunching. Even if you buy a very shiny very fast dedicated computer for this, where do the remaining 990 000 dollars go?

This is the worst use of $1M!!!

[EvoDevo]

First of all, I am doing research in computational biology. I just read the paper linked from his webpage at http://biology.boisestate.edu/hampikian and I have to say that this is one of the worse papers I have ever read. First of all, I can literally write a program to do all that he proposed in about 10 minutes. Give me the $1 mil, I'll do the research. Although the idea of systematically finding nullomers can have practical applications, there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence that they are incompatible with life. And wow, isn't this the eye catching title that we see on /. The numbers of nullomers that he found in the human genome, for example, looks like they are in line with expectation given a genome genome that is AT rich (more A and T nucleotides than G / C nucleotide). Because the human genome is finite (only about 3 billion nucleotides), of course you are going to find DNA sequence even at only 11 bases long that do not exist in the human genome. Just do the math! 4^11 = 4.2 billion. It makes me so furious that our government wastes so much money on useless stuff.

Run for the hills

[Adam J Stone]

There may also be some that are lethal in some species, but not others. We're looking for those sequences.

This article reminds me of a doomsday hypothesis I once read. Daniel Pouzzner [mega.nu] posted this some time ago on his website:

It is quite likely that the Endangered Species Act and similar policies will continue to be enforced, setting large areas of land (and associated natural resources) out of the reach of interested industries. Corporations in these industries will create a demand for black market genetic bullet engineering, by which obstacle species can be purged, freeing the land for industrial exploitation. The profit motive is overwhelming; the resources at issue are worth trillions of today's dollars annually. An engineer who can target species on demand can obviously target humans, or even subsets of humans, if he wants to. Black markets by definition are not subject to regulatory scrutiny, and of course tend to be populated by unsavory and low characters. The environmentalist extremists (many of whom are well-financed or independently wealthy) will retain the services of some of these black market operators, to "fight back" (as they see it) on behalf of the species being targeted for/by the corporations. This will probably culminate in a doomsday bug.