
Ambitious project to develop biological equivalent of operating system - J3L2404
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111107162223.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29
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stevenrace
The world of synthetic biology is nothing short of amazing.

But isn't this more or less what Craig Ventor [0] has done by stripping a
particular bacteria to the least amount of DNA needed to 'boot up' - in order
to build variations atop that base 'code'?

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter>

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rflrob
I can't tell exactly what this "AUdACiOuS" project is trying to do exactly,
but it sounds like a large part of it is coming up with (plain-old silicon-
based) software to model the internal goings-on of a cell. While that will
will certainly help with synthetic biology approaches, it's not an especially
groundbreaking idea. The problem is that cells don't really have an equivalent
of different address spaces: running one process might produce metabolites
that inhibit another pathway.

This "article" is little more than a breathless press-release, with pie-in-the
sky "potential applications" and no real details on what the project is
actually aiming to do.

The Venter project you've mentioned is, in my mind, even cooler than you've
given it credit for. It's entirely possible to strip genes out of a cell while
it's running, but what JCV did was to take a cell with all its DNA removed,
and insert a custom-designed genome. The goal is not so much to build things
on top of it, but to see what the minimal amount of information is to make
life.

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radarsat1
Amazing. However: Isn't this more like a reprogrammable simple component or
building block? I would think that "transistor" or at least "FPGA" might be a
better analogy than "operating system".

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npatrick04
This adds a whole new meaning to "software bug".

