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Living Cells Turned Into Computers
ananyo writes "Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in bacteria. These 'genetic circuits' could, for example, be used by scientists to track key moments in a cell's life or, in biotechnology, to turn on production of a drug at the flick of a chemical switch. The researchers have encoded 16 logic gates in modules of DNA and stored the results of logical operations. The different logic gates can be assembled into a wide variety of circuits."
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies.
Wait, I guess that's like basically just a person.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I suppose the ability to store data and program instructions in DNA would enable a Von Neumann architecture. The possibility of simulataneous "operations" on different parts of the genome might even make common bus based bottlenecks (where data cannot be fetched simultaneously with an instruction) less of a limit. But the speed of the thing would be agonisingly slow compared to silicon. Massively parallel perhaps but slow as a wet week.
You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle.
I'd be even more excited if there was a laser involved somewhere.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
These 'genetic circuits' could, for example, be used by scientists to track key moments in a cell's life or, in biotechnology, to turn on production of a drug at the flick of a chemical switch.
Code-Monkey Translation: ... }
Scientists, lacking a good debugger for living organisms, have made a breakthrough: They're now able to employ the tried and true tradition of adding
printf( "Made it here and didn't crash!" );
and/or
if ( DEBUG && VK_LSHIFT_DN ) {
code into bacteria.
Despite the platform being in open beta for as long as anyone can remember and its undeniable popularity the world over, professional coders experienced with situations that require resorting to this technique in undocumented code, badly supported 3rd party plug-ins, and poorly understood niche embedded systems, are advising the scientists to wait for the more mature 1.0 release of the DNA API specification before implementing their own domain specific language on the platform.