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Modeling the Building Blocks of Life
eldavojohn writes "A new research paper is creating some buzz about the roles of computer engineering in biology. Historically, computational techniques in genome sequencing have proved useful in predicting which DNA sequence produces which amino acid and which amino acid sequence produces which protein. Now, this new research is leading towards a robust model of proteins and their messaging systems. This is one step further in understanding the basics of life and, consequently, pushes us closer to being able to emulate organisms entirely from the bottom up instead of our failed prior approaches of from the top down. A long way from perfect, but an opening into a wide field of study and maybe even a new division of biology."
Then we can make programs to engineer a dragon.
I think custom programs like this are the upitamy of computational biology.
It is cool to think about how you would store the information to make a bone with a certain curve.
I'm sure there are huge interdependancies in the system but... we can just punch it in the
computer and see if it works none of that aliens 3 shit!
I want to hear more about organic ships.
Heck, if we could create a self propegating virus with a near-nil chance of mutation, that could specifically target and destroy another virus (ie: aids killing virus), we could wipe out entire strains of it. And if the facilities could model it at the most basic levels, the computer could simulate purposefull mutations (disable the self-kill genes) and try to find a combination that works against the next kind of mutation.
Also very usefull for producing hard-to-make chemicals, as we could create custom-made bacteria that churn out the protein sequence we want. We already do this in a lot of cases, but making the base bacteria is very difficult, and a steamlined method to make different kinds of chemicals could be a huge help for everyone involved.
If you want chemical farms, rather than make a whole bacterium, why not just make the enzyme or enzyme train that produces the chemical from a set of precursors, and then stick those into the DNA of a given bacterial species, in a sequence that will be strongly expressed? That's what we've been doing since the '80's, in bacteria and in animals. A friend of mine designed a cow that produced interferon in the cow's milk when fed zinc-rich foods, and it worked. Now, interferon isn't a new chemical. But the system for production of a new chemical as, essentially, a waste product, is a fairly well-understood process. The big question is modelling an enzyme surface to get the right transition topology to get the reactant->product working correctly.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.