
A machine that speeds up evolution is revolutionizing genome design - edward
http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpage/330/
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robbiep
For those not in the know George Church and his team have been at the
forefront of biochemical research and development of novel techniques for well
over a decade.

This concept, like so many other techniques developed by that lab, is very
impressive. The last major contribution I was on the cutting edge of (back in
2008) was the ability to predict and design proteins with totally different
amino acid sequences that performed the same function biologically, which was
revolutionary as it showed not only that you can replace almost every amino
acid in a protein with a different residue and be biologically equivalent. It
also proved that it was not the actual amino acid sequence that performed the
function but the type of residue (hydrophobic, hydrophillic, acidic, basic,
large or small). Of course, you can't overcome a well placed disulphide bond
but the ability to do this basically nullified any possibility that a company
or organisation could patent a particular protein, as you could simply replace
almost the entire sequence of that protein and still have the same
functionality.

I'm sure I have missed numerous other advances over the past 7 years as well.

Some cool stuff coming out of that lab.

Edit: it looks like this was from 2009 so not as cutting edge as I thought

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gwern
It may be from 2009, but it looks like there's been more work than I expected
using the MAGE machine going by Google Scholar cites of their paper
"Programming cells by multiplex genome engineering and accelerated evolution":
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12846716603863206939...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12846716603863206939&as_sdt=20000005&sciodt=0,21)

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wcoenen
Is glowingplant.com using something like this "MAGE" device?

They seem to be doing well at improving luminosity through directed evolution,
as can be seen in the graph in the December [1] update. According to their
last update[2], they've increased the automation since then.

[1] [http://blog.glowingplant.com/post/105558826472/happy-
holiday...](http://blog.glowingplant.com/post/105558826472/happy-holidays-
glowing-plant-december-update)

[2] [http://blog.glowingplant.com/post/118481662132/glowing-
plant...](http://blog.glowingplant.com/post/118481662132/glowing-plant-may-
update)

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smoyer
I wonder how the "life" this machine creates is regulated. In Eric K.
Drexler's book "Engines of Creation", he warns that the rise of self-assembly
and nanotechnology needs to be carefully controlled so that we don't end up
disassembling the whole world into "gray goo". It seems to me that a shotgun
approach to evolving organisms could be as dangerous.

~~~
lotsofmangos
_It seems to me that a shotgun approach to evolving organisms could be as
dangerous._

Viruses are well ahead of us in that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus)

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dschiptsov
Ok, the speed up is basically much quicker shuffling, but how do they test the
results?)

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ludamad
Can someone more in the field tell me if this is exciting to them, and to what
degree?

~~~
dnautics
It's a pain. There are better continuous evolution systems on the horizon. Not
many people use this. It's hard to select for anything besides growth.

