Extra base pairs
Tim Tyler
"Artificial letters added to life's alphabet"
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13252-artificial-letters-added-to-lifes-alphabet.html
From 32 to 128! What to do with all the extra letters...
Of course, the real fun would come from extra aminos. Start
by adding the common non-coded amino acids, with corresponding
mRNAs - that way at least the new organisms will stand a chance
in the wild without being dependent on dietary supplements.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ t...@tt1lock.org Remove lock to reply.
Tim Tyler
> "Artificial letters added to life's alphabet"
>
> http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13252-artificial-letters-added-to-lifes-alphabet.html
>
> From 32 to 128!
Oops - or even from 64 to 216.
Blackwater
wrote:
Gotta rebuild several OTHER things though to make USE of
those extra base pairs - including DNA repair enzymes
that might be confused by the new parts, tRNA, mRNA,
ribosomes, various transcription factors etc, etc etc.
Then you need to find useful proteins to build with the
extra information.
The advantage of going to more base pairs is that you
retain backwards compatibility ... they don't HAVE to be
used for anything that already works OK.
Then there's the question of necessity ... many of the
proteins built from DNA are rather large molecules. They
achieve their action not so much through 'chemistry'
directly but instead by having the right SHAPE and the
right electrical charges in the right places. It's very
common to see structural analogues to 'natural' proteins
that work just as well, even though their small-scale
chemical details are entirely different.
So, do we NEED more base pairs ... or more knowledge about
protein folding so we can coax the existing system into
producing proteins with exotic shapes ? This may be a
situation similar to CISC and RISC computer CPUs ... where
the RISC (reduced-instruction-set) CPU can ultimately do
exactly what the CISC (complex-instruction-set) CPU can
do, just by using more of the simpler instructions.
It *would* be nice to be able to encode for really exotic
stuff ... organic semiconductor proteins that could be
structured together into bona-fide electronic devices.
Forget the 'Borg' ... our hard-wiring would be made out
of all-'natural' stuff. Always wanted a math co-processor :-)
Tim Tyler
> So, do we NEED more base pairs ... or more knowledge about
> protein folding so we can coax the existing system into
> producing proteins with exotic shapes ? This may be a
> situation similar to CISC and RISC computer CPUs ... where
> the RISC (reduced-instruction-set) CPU can ultimately do
> exactly what the CISC (complex-instruction-set) CPU can
> do, just by using more of the simpler instructions.
In this case, with the new base pairs, the genomes will
be smaller, and the phenotypes can be made on a finer
scale - typical enzymes will be smaller. So it is a
win-win situation on the size front.
> It *would* be nice to be able to encode for really exotic
> stuff ... organic semiconductor proteins that could be
> structured together into bona-fide electronic devices.
> Forget the 'Borg' ... our hard-wiring would be made out
> of all-'natural' stuff. Always wanted a math co-processor :-)
Extra base pairs are probably not for doing real engineering with.
For that, it seems more likely that we will ditch DNA entirely.