Reprogrammed bacterium speaks new language of life.

reply to post by CitizenJack


I just think that this stuff is to problematic to be done inside our biosphere this and robotic/automated duplicating nanotech should be banned from Earth, this could be a good motivator to start a lunar colony or even the habitation of Mars let them go crazy with genetics and nanotech in those "closed" environments but its too dangerous to risk a FUP here...

reply to post by Panic2k11


I can see the need for reservation. One has to just simply look at our past to see what happens when science goes all willy-nilly . Reckless science is no ones friend.

They did mention this

What's more, there's little threat of recoded E. coli swapping genes with its natural counterpart, were GROs ever to escape into the wild. Reassigned stop codons would be read as normal stop codons in natural cells, resulting in the premature termination of protein production. Preliminary studies also suggest that GROs cannot grow in the absence of the unnatural amino acid they've been designed to incorporate – adding another level of security.

However if you notice tho the word before threat is "little".
I does seem tho that we could potentially be able to create a mini biosphere (set to specifics) for these little guys to see how they grow and evolve on their own before unleashing the beast so to speak.
Then we could introduce unmodified bacteria to their biosphere and see what happen. That seems the responsible route to go. Outside of a moon lab which I would definitely prefer.

reply to post by CitizenJack


Life is not static and we still do not understand its workings to establish clear safety rules, from viral cross genetic transfer to mutations to the way bacteria share genetically information the door to something going wrong is very large.

Moving this industry off world (for stats) would be a great boost for economic sustainability of colonization and even help extraterrestrial industry, mining and terraforming,..

You know, there's an interesting (well, to me anyway) reason that there is redundancy in codons. It turns out that the ones that are redundant code for common mutations or repair errors. Generally, you'll see a redundancy when the repair enzymes screw up in a common way, and the redundancy will cover both the screw up and the correct repair. That way, you get the right amino acid regardless of the outcome.

If you remove the redundancies, you greatly increase the likelihood that you'll get a lethal error. They're there for a reason.

reply to post by Bedlam


I did not know that. That makes a lot of sense to build in a self correcting error , nature is a pretty efficient mechanism. Thanks for that tidbit I find it very interesting and wonder how this applies to the research.

reply to post by CitizenJack


Long ago when I took some grad level microbiology courses (it was for a project, don't ask), they went into some depth about it. I don't have my notebooks with me. Apparently, in some cases if you get a certain error or damage to the strand, the repair enzymes will sweep the strand repairing and/or excising errors, and in some cases it's obvious what the correction needs to be, and in others it's ambiguous. The enzymes will repair ambiguous errors but they have to guess at the correction. In that case, the redundancy covers you on most of the common mistakes.

You'd be AMAZED at the number and types of errors that occur, and at the complexity of the repair systems that are constantly zipping along and patching things back together. For instance, if you have a repeated sequence of T - T - T on one side, a UV photon can smack them apart so that instead of looking like this:

T - A
T - A
T - A

it looks like:

T A
| |
T A

That doesn't work anymore as a template for transfer RNA. So you have an excision enzyme that combs the strands looking for this all the time. If it finds it, it whacks them out, another enzyme then comes along and inserts a repair set of base pairs and patches the two ends back together. But it's ambiguous as to what side was T and what side was A. So you see that one as a redundancy.

wow. fascinating (and scary!) stuff.
Why do I keep thinking of Sonmi, one of the the 'fabricants' in Cloud Atlas? (biologically designed to terminate without a certain substance) Yee
Interesting info, thanks for posting it!

Its just like script kiddies playing with something they don't understand...

Reverse-engineering is the name of the game in Genetics!!

Panic2k11
reply to post by CitizenJack

 

Life is not static and we still do not understand its workings to establish clear safety rules, from viral cross genetic transfer to mutations to the way bacteria share genetically information the door to something going wrong is very large.

Moving this industry off world (for stats) would be a great boost for economic sustainability of colonization and even help extraterrestrial industry, mining and terraforming,..

edit on 17-10-2013 by Panic2k11 because: (no reason given)

Wow thats a creative and very logical way to look at it. I wholeheartedly agree that we need to get our buts in space and start reaching out some more. This would provide such an incentive for so many industries . I realize most of the burden comes down to actually getting off our rock, gravity is a mean mean mistress...
However with out getting to political, the money we have been spending on wars and other interest probably could have gone towards reaserch into better propulsion methods to get off earth... Jus sayin.
Currently the price tag is around 10,000 a pound.
Or 16072.47 for a kilo (for the silly europeans )

reply to post by Bedlam


I wonder if thats supposedly why these bacteria can't really survive outside of the environments they are raised and manipulated in. It would seem to me that the bacteria in our normal environment would reject these all together.
Maybe thats why they are confident there is little risk. Hmm..
All I know for sure is you are more knowledgeable than I in these matters than I.
Thank you for the lesson. As they say knowledge is power.

CitizenJack
reply to post by Bedlam

 

I did not know that. That makes a lot of sense to build in a self correcting error , nature is a pretty efficient mechanism. Thanks for that tidbit I find it very interesting and wonder how this applies to the research.

edit on 17-10-2013 by CitizenJack because: (no reason given)

edit on 17-10-2013 by CitizenJack because: (no reason given)

Your reply here reminds me of a mystery I have not been able to yet resolve. It's a mystery concerning the thinking process behind statements like the one you made. You probably didn't mean it in this sense, but a lot of people certainly do.

Why do people talk about nature like it is a conscious force? A tangible, constantly acting force, that drives our progression. But not only that, people who talk about it in this sense are often the most DIE HARD ATHIESTS and anti-religious personalities I know. According to our beloved current scientific paradigm (wouldn't want to upset that on here), all our progress to this stage by the 'natural' process of evolution was ACCIDENTAL. That correction mechanism isn't there for efficiency, nope, it's an accident (like the millions of other accidents upon accidents upon accidents) that nature churned out that actually turned out to not only be useful but light years ahead of anything we, CONSCIOUS/THINKING HUMANS, have done.

In fact, EVERYTHING nature has 'accidentally' or 'naturally' done is mostly light years ahead of us. Remember, we are conscious. Nature isn't conscious, it's a number running machine if anything. That number running machine created the most impressive thing in the entire universe - our body - along with a genius 3-DIMENSIONAL 4-BIT CODE called DNA. Let's not forget this amazing computer code has existed for possibly billions upon billions of years, and nature seemingly didn't have too much trouble implementing this, or should I say nature didn't have too much trouble accidentally scrambling a bunch of atoms together in a very impressive way. We, on the other hand, as conscious, rational and to be honest GOD-LIKE creatures in comparison to unconscious, non-driven and accidental nature, took ~2 million years to get to the point where we can even make 2-DIMENSIONAL 2-BIT code, let alone spawn the biological brilliance that is our universe. We are only just now discovering the possibility of self-assembling machinery. This has taken us thousands of years worth of knowledge, blood, sweat and tears across a WHOLE RANGE OF DIFFERENT FIELDS, yet of course, nature accidentally created the most impressive self-assembling and REPRODUCING machine in the universe from pretty much day-1 of life, which has led to this - the human body. We could only DREAM of such an invention, regardless how far we are with physics/chemistry/electronics/computing/nanotechnology/manufacturing and so forth and so forth.

Remember, nature does all of this accidentally. Yeah, I know it sounds absurd sometimes, but remember guys, this is Darwinism! And we love Darwinism! Oh let's not forget, even though nature is a random number churning accidental machine that just happens to work alongside a platform that allows it to manifest in actual meaningful and progressive ways, given enough time ANYTHING WILL HAPPEN (but let's never ask what provides the probabilities and what assigns them to the corresponding events, besides the actual platform for these things to manifest on). That's our neat little way of wrapping up this ridiculousness.

(Btw that's one of my favourite sayings - 'oh it naturally happened', it's like a magic word that means no further understanding is required - it IS AS BAD of an excuse as just saying 'God did it', of course many would deny this strongly).

Why is 'nature' talked about in this way by some? They do it without even realising. My favourite example is hearing a stone-cold atheist talk about evolution and say things such as 'polar bears are white because nature knew to give them white fur in the arctic' LOL. This is ABSURD! People do it unconsciously most of the time, and you'd be surprised how many people aren't actually even aware that evolution (macro/genetical - doesn't matter) is COMPLETELY ACCIDENTAL. THERE IS ZERO DRIVING FORCE ACCORDING TO OUR UNDERSTANDING. NONE WHATSOEVER. At least this is DARWIN'S THEORY. Which many people defend to the grave. If you believe evolution works in another way (micro-evolution is a different story now, since we understand epigenetics now but macro-evolution still fails into the 'accidental' category) then you may as well be a creationist, since you are not anymore believing in our BELOVED DARWINISTIC view of life.

'Nature is efficient' - 'It makes sense for nature to do that' - 'Nature gave us this/gave that animal this'

Do people not realise, that by speaking of nature in this way, you are speaking of a creator/a designer/a GOD. You are speaking of it as a force that drives the progression of this universe. That CANNOT EXIST INHERENTLY by our understanding. Such an existence would be nothing less than a God.

Nature can't think, it can't plan, it can't implement improvements based on drawbacks. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that everyone actually believes in a creator, except for they use the words nature and put it down to genetics and evolution, and that makes them feel good because that way they are not one of those 'silly religious nuts believing in fairy tales'.

Regardless, I am not here to promote or demote any ideas of natural evolution/spirituality/or any form of creationism.
I am merely just commenting on something I see a lot. Once again, not directed specifically at you, but the way you worded your sentence reminded me of this irk I have. I am a believer of evolution, though I believe Darwin was wrong (perhaps not fully aware would be a better phrase) about a few things, and I believe evolution MIGHT BE a process fundamentally ingrained into our universe, much like the fundamental forces in physics, rather than a fanciful word for a series of accidents following apparent miracles (original formation of the unbelievable manufacturing and factory production we call simple life, or even the building blocks of life themselves, or even the genetic code and so forth and so forth), that science is still explaining one step at a time going backwards billions of years.

The thing about science (I love it, I hold a Masters in Engineering), is that once we discovered it we pretty much dismissed all other ideologies we had, and started fresh. It's a catch up game now. The 'how' eventually will hit a wall and curl back up into a 'Why'.

On another note; that study is sheer brilliance. The schematics of this system we call life are truly beautiful, yet I worry that we are aiming to have more control over it than we should. The realm of creating and configuring species in whole new ways should probably be left to our virtual worlds (games won't be too far off the grade of detail of our universe soon enough). The potential for good is great, but the potential for bad is very worrying. But hey ho, who am I to complain. A mere single human, what progression can I alter.

Peace

reply to post by DazDaKing


# I must've been flipping bored when I wrote all that. Ignore my sarcastic ramblings lol, but seriously is it just me who notices other people do do that? Maybe I'm just surrounded by closet creationists This is why I have to keep an agnostic viewpoint.

Back on topic though, I'm noticing these biological progressions happening very quickly recently, we're actually going to be able to successfully make DNA for anything we want at this rate - literally the key to life. Knowing how the world is right now with that ability I could picture military or big corps even making slave races/clones for just work. It'll be like the Sumerian Annunaki story all over again...

Or we could also use that knowledge to cure any genetically related problem, heal eco systems and create new ones, we could make an intelligent race and treat them right, theyd be superior to us though eventually. Theres a parallel there with our inorganic timeline - AI and robotics. Maybe even immortality depending on how deep our manipulation of the building blocks gets...maybe.

Still, leave it to the virtual world for now. Worlds not in the right shape right now. These technological advancements need a unified and equal race, or a race with rulers who genuinely are all about helping and progressing all of humanity with our technological advancements, which is also unified. We are nowhere near either of those! If restricted to only helping with conditions and diseases I'm all up for it.

reply to post by DazDaKing


As the Aussies would say, No worries mate.
I actually enjoy having conversations like that for the benefit of discussing ideas and beliefs. Anything that can open up meaningful discussion is great. You made some great points that I actually consider to be on track with certain beliefs I hold.

I dont belong to one club when it comes to creation and evolution, I admit that I'm just a normal guy who can barely grasp the idea and working of this grand thing called the universe. I'm along for the ride and want to learn and observe as much as possible while I'm here. I believe thats why some folks come to a place like ATS.

Currently I believe the that the truth between creation and evolution may actually lay somewhere in between, but I dont know this to be fact so I'm going to keep turning over stones and keep searching like the rest of my fellow humans.

Thanks for generating an interesting convo.