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Engineers Invent Programming Language To Build Synthetic DNA
vinces99 writes "Chemists soon could be able to use a structured set of instructions to 'program' how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell. A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as smart drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level."
If there is a programming language available, a virus can be written.
Biological systems have many broken legacy "routines" that don't get called, or get called, and execute incorrectly. How do these engineers intend to deal with exception handling in this capacity?
For instance, a well known mutation known as bombay phenotype involved a precursor protein called "H protein", which then gets modified by additional cellular processes to become either A or B blood antigen. The mutation makes a defective H protein, and thus prevents the proper activation of the A or B antigen "routine".
If they try to build a programing language for cellular processes involving DNA and protein synthesis, then how will they handle exception cases, such as that one? It can be likened to the halting problem, because the question asked is "given these inputs and this program, will the program ever halt?"
How do they intend to resolve this problem?
implement RAM in a synthetic genome?
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Right?
Will people in the near future carry gene sequencers in their pockets?
Go back to 1969 and say that people will carry computers in their pockets.
They're late to the party.
emacs CTRL+d,n,a
http://xkcd.com/378/
The proposed language is for DNA computing only not synthetic biology. For synthetic biology there is already an established language called the Synthetic Biology Open language (SBOL).
Would the potential be there for a direct interface between technology and the brain?
Expanding capacity on certain areas of the brain might allow for increased capabilities in some areas through nanotech, like increased intuition or some form of medium term memory, built on expanding short term memory.
Exciting possibilities if/when they can be achieved.
Of humans. Like in Gattaca.
On the other hand, programming errors could explain a few of the people I know today: null pointer assignments.
Have gnu, will travel.
Now that we've got the code, has anyone checked our DNA to see what got REM'd out?
Brooks' law doubtless applies. To maximize productivity, I recommend that the size of DNA programming teams be limited to two .
I'm imagining it more like verilog than c++
The sample looks like APL. Why invent a language with non-standard-keyboard symbols unless you really have to?
Table-ized A.I.
What if they remove the organism's ability to synthesize lysine? That should make them dependent on supplements for survival; thus easy to control. After all, what could go wrong?
So... I didn't read all of the references in TFA, but this instruction set is written in LISP right? It certainly seems like the only sane language to use to develop something like this.
Then it seems like we don't have too much to worry about in regards to viruses, since few people understand LISP worth a damn. :-) I kid, but I definitely would be interested in knowing more details, since TFA was sparse on its own.
To be clear, this method of computation is not a method that is done by any natural biological system as far as I know. Their method of computation involves recombining how DNA single-strands hydrogen-bond to each other. Chemical reaction networks don't necessarily have to be done with DNA, but it's much easier to implement arbitrary networks with DNA than with other sorts of molecules since you can design how DNA sticks to other DNA. So there's really no correlation between how this code works and the "genetic code" which encodes for proteins and regulatory networks. Source: I worked for a few months with one of the authors of the paper.
Enter, GeNOME Desktop Environment
Pretty simple language: four constants, no explicit operators, but concatenation is implied between constants.
I sequenced my girlfriend last night. I'd paste the base pairs here, but the window isn't large enough.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.