Engineering of human cells reveals genome's resilience to structural changes | Hacker News Reader

Engineering of human cells reveals genome's resilience to structural changes

phys.org

48 pointsPaulHoule6 comments

Not a biochemist... But, isn't there a problem with test coverage here? "cells in a dish" is not a full organism which requires cell differentiation, where more specific genes are expressed?

Isn't some genetic code also conditional and expressed under different external pressures? Kind of like how you can delete or break (within syntactically correct changes) huge portions of code in the Linux kernel and still have it build and run fine locally.. because they are featured you don't happen to be using right now or are device drivers for hardware you are not currently running.

[one of the authors of the two studies] Absolutely spot on - there would likely be more issues if the cells were forced to develop from a single cell to a full blown organism. However, thinking of it as a smoke test, it can still be surprising that such large stretches of DNA are dispensable and the cells survive and propagate!

Thanks. It is surprising. I suppose to be more specific, it demonstrates how the genome is composable in the extreme, which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.

Good point. A condition like autism or schizotypy might not be about "the way your cells work right now" but rather about how your brain was wired during development and what a drug or gene therapy could do now is limited.

Still on some level, cells have a basic 'operating system' of genes that are involved in everyday metabolism and cell replication, then there are genes involved in development and there are also genes that certain cells use to do their special work. Genes related to development can be somewhat tested with methods like

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9310295/

Reminds me of Michael Levin's work, where they found that planaria look the same regardless of how you screw around with their genetic material.

If you are like me who read The Code Breaker you come here and read this article and say "I get it". Raise your hand!

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