
Ask HN: Can we deserialize organisms from DNA yet? - dosy
Not a specific organism (with its synapses, memories, methylation, quantum state, soul etc), but an &quot;instance&quot; of the species from a &quot;representative, accurate&quot; copy of its DNA on a hard disk.<p>The question is not &quot;is the DNA accurate enough&quot; (tho maybe that is a thing, I don&#x27;t know), but if we have &quot;accurate&quot; DNA, can we somehow create a living thing (not knowing how accurate this is, but to illustrate the meaning: print DNA into bases, put these in a cell, somehow grow that cell into the organism). Has it been done?
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cimmanom
We're still learning how to convert an amino acid sequence into a folded
protein. We're still learning which parts of a DNA sequence are and are not
active and under what circumstances and which other parts of the DNA control
that and how.

We're as far from building an organism from scratch as a newborn is from
solving Fermat's theorem.

As for building an organism from an existing DNA sequence _without_
understanding that sequence, were perhaps a little closer. We've created a
human child from the body of one egg and the nucleus of another (plus a
sperm).

But that won't work for an arbitrary DNA sequence, as there's much more to a
cell than a nucleus. Each species has its own collection of organelles in its
cells; its own signaling structures built into the cell walls.

Imagining that DNA is all you need to recreate an organism is a common
misconception about biology. If you're interested in this field, I recommend
picking up a textbook at the AP Biology level to start with.

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karolisd
No. Not even close. I assume you're talking about organisms with the
complexity of animals.

Maybe the Wooly Mammoth project can give you some insight on how far we are
from having DNA to making it into an organism:
[http://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-
mammoth/](http://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/)

