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Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Epigenetics is more like a small twist in the Fundamental Dogma of Biology. And "proteomics" doesn't mean much of anything--all proteins derive from DNA.

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I don't know, are go-to statements and code reuse a small twist in the dogma of software engineering?

Is your Python-level code directly interacting with CPU operations and memory bit flipping a small twist?

Hi-C 3D DNA structure experiments as well as small RNA fragments interfering with transcriptions and protein function are not a small twist in my opinion - it's like finding out there's an entire extra hierarchy of layers to the system.

Those are great and non-obvious discoveries, but they don't particularly change the fact that (virtually?) all genetic information is carried via DNA. (...and possibly similar mechanisms that don't particular change the overall story)

Well, no, it doesn't change the fact that DNA contains (most of) the information. What it means is that even if I give you all of the bases on all of the chromosomes, if you don't know how these strings of beads will fold in a real cell (in the presence of all kinds of other things, like proteins and metal ions, which in a fertilized egg will come from the mother - a bootstrapping problem), it does not get you very far. It might not be unlike getting all the lines of code in a codebase, but not getting the ordering, only a bag of lines of code.

The central dogma, though still taught in schools, is a strongly oversimplified model of how information moves in a cell. In fact, there is so much regulation going on on all levels that proteins, in some sense, aren‘t even the main „product“ of DNA. (Most DNA is not proteinogenic, but rather has regulatory functions.) Also, proteins are extensively modified after transcription and even after translation, so yes, „proteomics“ very much does have meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...

My point was that all of that regulatory behavior is ultimately captured in the organism's DNA.

OP was claiming that you can't even really understand any of this unless you understand "the entire ecosystem - including the sum total of all individuals and species [on earth] and their previous and current state".

That's technically true in some sense, but most scientists would roll their eyes at the wildly expansive nature of this claim.

If you fully understood the information in an organism's DNA, plus the DNA of their close symbionts, that'd be a rather complete picture.

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