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Comment by glymor | Hacker News Reader

Better write up: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/05/first-functional...

This one is pretty informative too http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html

Another one from Venter's website: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replica... (on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364544)

Or http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958

My favorite part from that article:

So that the assembled genome would be recognizable as synthetic, four of the ordered DNA sequences contained strings of bases that, in code, spell out an e-mail address, the names of many of the people involved in the project, and a few famous quotations.

I guess sooner or later the random mutations may make these string "corrupted".

I hope they included checkbits!

it may be a misconception but i think that checkbits are a feature of organic dna?

Yep! There is some error-checking built into dna-replication. The protein that does the replication is called DNA Polymerase. From its wikipedia article:

Error correction is a property of some, but not all, DNA polymerases. This process corrects mistakes in newly-synthesized DNA. When an incorrect base pair is recognized, DNA polymerase reverses its direction by one base pair of DNA. The 3'-5' exonuclease activity of the enzyme allows the incorrect base pair to be excised (this activity is known as proofreading). Following base excision, the polymerase can re-insert the correct base and replication can continue.

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