Ambitious project to develop biological equivalent of operating system

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

by J3L2404 • 15 years ago

40 4 15 years ago

sciencedaily.com

stevenrace• 15 years ago

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

rflrob• 15 years ago

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.

npatrick04• 15 years ago

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

radarsat1• 15 years ago

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".

Ambitious project to develop biological equivalent of operating system

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