Cells programmed like computers to fight disease
www2.warwick.ac.uk
www2.warwick.ac.uk
Reaction to article: WTF is this garbage? We've been able to build RNA sequences forever. Anyone who has read ANYTHING about bioinformatics knows RNA works like 'computer code' to tell a cell how to make a protein. This is high school level biology.
'The researchers made their invention by first modelling all possible RNA sequence interactions on a computer.' No, they didn't. Jesus Christ no they didn't. I don't know what they actually DID, or what they even CLAIM to have done, but they did not do this. First off, there is no limit to the number of possible RNA sequences. Secondly, there is no limit to the variety of possible interactions. You know Folding@Home? It simulates protein folding? That's what happens after you feed some RNA into a cells protein factory. So even if you figured out the infinite variety of proteins possibly created by the infinite variety of RNA sequences interacting with themselves and all the rest of the cellular contents (including potential viruses or bacteria that snuck in), then you'd have to solve every single folding problem on all of them.
Once you get to the actual words of the actual people doing the science, hey magic, it actually makes sense and sounds cool! But WOW, whoever wrote that press release up to the point where the closing quotation starts? That person needs to never write a press release for a scientific finding ever again. Humanity will be better off!
Look into synthetic biology and biological parts: http://parts.igem.org/Main_Page
This is just one way of getting to "programmable cells." Basically what they're doing is creating a database of DNA sequences that can be stringed together to create programs in cells. There's even GUI editors for this stuff, tons of standards around the syntax, etc.
But Biology is messy. This stuff isn't going to be running deterministically, it requires a deep understanding of the organism, it requires a deep understanding of the overall environment an organism operates in, etc.
We see nothing like this level of randomness in the already chaotic world of software development. When one works on complex projects with more than a few hundred people one constantly sees random things bumping into each other producing stuff nobody imagined. But this stuff happening inside a cell is just insane too me. Makes me feel like a cave man playing with my current set of stone age tools.
This press release drove me crazy the way it was written, both insulting and deceptive, but the research sounds very interesting. They mention doing arithmetic, which would make it pretty general. I'd love to know if they have any means of doing loops. There's mention of Turing machines in the press release but I'd guess that's just something that popped up in the weird garbage can of the authors mind while grunting the thing out.
Something like this combined with the ideas of 'amorphous computing' (think tons and tons of tiny unreliable processors communicating over short-range links, computation happening primarily as a large-scale emergent property of the whole system) might help things get truly weird in the future... thinking RNA paint? Sure, OK.
I'm not an RNA guy, but as far as I can tell, the highlight from the paper is that they've shown that you can computationally design these networks in an RNA-based system.
This kind of thing has been done with genetic circuits (DNA): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/aac7341
I guess the somewhat interesting question is, 20+ years from now, will biological computers be DNA or RNA based?
The entire press release is cringeworthy.
What a world! There is far more in your sentence than the average geek might understand if she reads it too quickly. It could be nice to help everyone understand while keeping the humouristic touch.
(I only glanced through the OP, though.)