Cello – a programming language for living cells | Hacker News Reader

Cello – a programming language for living cells

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62 pointspedrocosta19 comments

http://cellocad.org/about.html actual website, because it's way too hard to add links in news articles apparently

And the article was written by a business development manager.

Am I missing something, why there is so little attention to this?

Because if this is not revolutionary, I don't know, what else deserves the term ...

Sure, it seems not to be working perfect, yet, with "only" 45 of 60 "programms" working in a actual cell, but it just sounds amazing to me. But I don't know much about verilog or genetics in general, so I actually might miss out some huge limitations ... but it still seems like a great success, with so many potential applications ... I mean actual programming like you're used to, but you don't target silicon, but a living cell! (and a cell can reproduce itself ...)

It probably still takes great knowledge of genetics and cell structure in general, to make something that works ... but I think, I start learning that now.

> Because if this is not revolutionary, I don't know, what else deserves the term ...

DNA computing was known and well-developed from around the late 90s. This work only adds a tiny layer of abstraction to simplify building circuits - something that previously was done with raw schematics. Given how simple those circuits are, there is not that much difference, really.

> Given how simple those circuits are, there is not that much difference, really.

So this might be the real limitation, but if I don't have to build those circuits by hand, couldn't I build much more complex circuits with that "tiny layer of abstraction"?

And as I said, I don't know much about verilog or genetics, but from a quick overview, it seemed to me, that I could define variables, flow-structure, etc. (modules?) so pretty much classic programming?

You're not building any distinct conductive "wires" in a cell - each wire is a global chemical signal, therefore there is a hard limit on how many of those you can put into a single cell.

And, behavioural is not supported (i.e., no flip-flops, and definitely no clock signal), so you can only have combinational logic.

Thanks for your input. So it seems, there are indeed huge limitations ... Could you give a rough number "on how many of those you can put into a single cell"?

Anyway, I still think, this is a great step forward, but maybe not as revolutionary, as I thought at first look (I think basic info like this, belongs into the news article).

Could you not split the computation up across multiple cells? IE: Don't only create 1 cell, create 4 cells that do different parts of the task an do message passing to each other.

I mainly work with eukaryotes, so I don't know much microbio aside from generating vectors. Do we actually know enough about bacteria for this to work? I can see it working for a small number of elements (anti-biotic resistance, promoter sites, cloned genes). But not for any behavior more complex than that?

It would be awesome a future where you can hack your own bioreactors at home with bacterias to grow whatever you want! But it could be very dangerous too and create new potential pathogens.. this could make the war of antibiotics even harder.

I'm not a biologist, but doesn't the scheme & lisp model of "every function is a monad that is just consecutively partially-applied to a set of data."

I have no experience with biology, but from what I remember in my highschool class, that's what it sounded like. Take an input, simple transformation, make an output.

Hopefully someone more experienced can clear this up for me.

Very cool. So they later might be closing in to repairing dna and removing some specific decides linked to specific dna. Perhaps also in the future also give option for a higher protection against viruses and bacteria. A little creepy but this could lead to a huge break throu I believe.

??? http://libcello.org/

My wife is a bioinformatition and she usually scoffs at these things.

Genuinely curious, what is it about these things that she is disdainful. I ask because I there I imagine two scenarios. The first scenario has an expert not recognizing the potential for powerful abstraction to augment an individual's effort. I have run across this attitude in programmers sometimes--they say things like "C++ is the new assembly." The second scenario is has a layman not realizing the ignorance of their effort. I have run across this problem in new agers who get a little knowledge about string theory and believe the universe's sympathetic vibrations can be felt by the soul. A string theorist would rightly scoff at their conclusion.

Unfortunate naming collision with Cello: High Level C: http://libcello.org/

I am learning the non-biological libcello, and thought the same thing, but the title goes on to say 'for living cells'.

I guess since the Cello for cells uses Verilog, you could write a libcello-based C-program to do the same. Cello-cello ;)

As I get older, the whole 'the universe is a big computer' thing has gone from 'what a whacko concept', to 'those parallels are interesting', to 'OMG, I am just a bit!'. Real life is stranger than fiction. Amazing.

I'll quote @slackstation from his comment in an entry from a month ago:

> I hope you like zombies because this is how you get zombies.

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