It's wild to think that biology is basically built through molecular additive manufacturing. Converting nature's 3d printer into a technology that we can leverage for the fabrication of materials and structures seems inevitable.
Drew Berry has done some mind-blowing animations of how these systems work.
It gets wilder. In a 3D printer, the commands come from a computer and the current state is maintained in its memory as well. In a multicellular biological system, that state is stored within the thing itself that is being built. And the commands come from it self-organizing.
> It gets wilder. In a 3D printer, the commands come from a computer and the current state is maintained in its memory as well. In a multicellular biological system, that state is stored within the thing itself that is being built. And the commands come from it self-organizing.
I'm a cellular and molecular biologist by education and training, and I still vividly recall when I realized what detriments were and the role in the formation of tissue/muscle/organs/human and the innate complexity in all living things. I was in us awe, such that I couldn't speak for a few days and my mind raced as everything around me felt... magical.
Sadly, the health sciences is amongst the most corrupt Industries and has a habit of breaking the best amongst us, and despite my exodus I still think biology is the most comprehensive (and perhaps less understood by the general public) of all the Sciences and if we have any semblance of self-awareness as a Species will be what defines the 21st century.
Ive seen it outlined here before that physics, engineering and chemistry has given us computers from iterative processes of innovation, whereas Biology as given us a level of complexity that far surpasses computers and even encompasses sentient self-organized systems with no blueprint for how exactly it got there from amino acids (and thus RNA/DNA) and it us our responsibility to understand, revere and eventually emulate the Laws of Nature.
There were tinkerers at home in rooms or garages on personal computers in the early days with (what we consider today to be) underpowered equipment and tools, but the DIY spirit arguably pushed computing forward out of the mainframe age.
Are we at that point yet with cellular and/or molecular [synthetic] biology where curious individuals can tinker in their own homes?
Homeboy genetically modified a virus that would repair his lactose intolerance and then tried it on himself. It worked (until the stomach lining wore down and was replaced with fresh cells, and he just used it again).
I tend to think all Industries are corrupt, but everyone thinks their own is the worst. My day to day interactions with the health industry seems normal, like all good people. My doctor seems normal, my neighbors seem normal. But then when I see the non-stop big pharma ad-campaigns, then it looks shady.
Guess it comes down to the definition of 'corruption', and what level we are talking about. I think when most people say their industry is corrupt, we are talking about general Greed, and that isn't really corruption, it is just capitalism. And it gets shady on a sliding scale with the amount of money involved.
I wouldn't call it "corrupt", but it amazes me how often you would ask a doctor something seemingly trivial and they're like "oh we don't know why this happens". It must be one of the few industries where it's impossible to have a complete understanding of the subject, no matter how hard you try.
The last few paragraphs describe how they basically created unstoppable super-bacteria that are untargetable by any existing medication or immune response, what could go wrong? Let’s hope their lab safety is uncharacteristically excellent.
This is already done. Essentially making a medicine goes like this:
1) is it functional? Yes -> step 2
2) is it cytotoxic? (kills everything, for example by dissolving cell membranes) No -> goto step 3
3) is it neurotoxic? (prevents neurons from working) No -> goto step 4
4 to 199) is it ...toxic?
200) proceed to in vitro testing
Someone made a paper ... what happens if you just reverse steps 2 through 199? Start with any old protein, and keep changing it to display as many different kinds of toxicity as possible.
Answer: This just works. Works very well, since we know computational tests for a whole lot of toxicities, and at least a few of them are differentiable.
So you can just assume essentially every country has already done this and tested it.
Fortunately this is not such a huge issue. The challenge is not making poisons, the challenge is spreading them effectively (without ...). Some of these proteins would at least need contact between a large drop of the protein and your skin. Most would need to be injected to kill you. So ...
And we know plenty of non-protein molecules, much easier and faster to make, available in industrial quantities without much checking, that are about as bad as the worst of these proteins.
Also: there are radioactive substances sold on Amazon that'll kill you slowly and painfully just being near you.
No. Prions are not "infectious proteins", they are "transmissible protein folds". The universe of proteins which can be spontaneously misfolded by another protein that is already misfolded is relatively rare. It's also not very difficult to engineer. When I was in grad school some of my classmates tried (not all amyloid "prion" proteins are bad, some are structural, such as pMel which is used to sequester toxic melanin precursors and scaffold them into melanin), and it was difficult to improve upon nature.
It's very likely that every "prion-capable" protein is that way for a strategic reason (e.g. Alzheimer's protein is likely that way to ensnare viruses before they can further damage brains).
Not every protein needs to be capable of misfolding, life would be very metastable if every protein were, so, no, you will not turn into a "puddle of goo" via an engineered prion. It might really suck, and your brain (or pick organ here) would get holes drilled in it over the course of years. But not hours.
It may be difficult for humans to improve on nature. It may be easier for AIs. Keep in mind that the space explored by evolution is necessarily quite restricted, and very damaging entities would have been selected out if at all possible. What you can imagine based on the evolved structures you've seen may be more limited than you realize.
In any case, my previous comments were intended jokingly, they weren't submissions to Methods in Molecular Biology.
Uh ok. I mean AI is data limited. Molecular biology (outside of structural biology) is not exactly a discipline where a firehouse of uncoupled data emerge. It's not uncommon to find publications with 5 data points, n=3 on each.
They should act very carefully, just like the researchers working in quantum physics and machine learning/artificial intelligence field. There is too much mayhem you can obviously cause with this new kind of technology possibilities/views. And while breaking current limitation boundaries, they should always keep in mind (remember) the 'greater good' for the average popular masses.
I want to say I read a few years back some scientists were studying the possibility of using phages to fight super bacteria, apparently can evolve to be either phage resistant or antibiotic resistant but never both, or at least that was the gist of it I can remember.
Did I miss something? There's something in there about using a modified amino acid to enhance the immune response against tumors, and something about bacteriophage resistance, but the last few paragraphs are about synthesizing polymers.
Extending protein alphabet with non-standard amino acids and DNA/RNA alphabet with additional "letters"[1] could drive an explosive growth in the amount of possibilities.
Possibly. However proteins already use 20 (or 21) amino acids, and do post-translational modification of these. In addition, they use cofactors, metal clusters, and other ways to tweak the chemistry they have available.
As an analogy, it seem a little like a programming language - up to a point, adding more keywords and operators makes it more 'powerful' (all Turing-complete languages are equally powerful, yes). However beyond that you are just adding more specialised parts that could achieve the same thing with more, simpler parts.
I guess I am saying that the leap from, say a 5 amino acid alphabet to a 20 letter one might result in an explosive growth, but it is diminishing returns after that.
I think the key advantage here is adding synthetic amino acids to key sites (e.g., a binding interface). It'll be easier to modify surface chemistry that way, rather than modifying the structure of the entire protein to try and subtly alter a reaction site of interest. But yes, we are a long from adding new amino acids and DNA bases to the natural alphabet - all the molecular machines we currently have are optimised for 4 bases and 20 amino acids, it's not trivial to do it better than nature!
Even without introducing new amino acids (which sounds very tricky indeed, as the article notes, this could really mess up normal biological structure and function due to codon usage issues, i.e. if you tried to devote some of the 61 available codons (64 - 3 stop codons) to unique amino acids, ribosomes might start plugging the weird ones into normal proteins with catastrophic results. Making a mirror-image ribosome seems like a lot of work... and with some issues, like escaping into the wild might be a problem, i.e. if a mirror-image microbe started replicating, what would eat it? Would it be the worst invasive species imaginable?
There are more standard approaches that are interesting, like extending existing biochemical synthesis pathways via novel proteins, such as microbes capable of standard chemical conversions of natural products, such as salicylic acid + acetin anhydride to aspirin and similar transformations of more interesting compounds. Usually these are small-molecule additions to large natural products, so you have to engineer the metabolism to make the small molecule at the same rate as the large molecule and then build a protein capable of the final synthetic step (using only the standard set of amino acids).
In class 10th biology I was shocked to learn human stature does not change after puberty after growth plates are closed.
It seems new research believes this is not to be case.
We've evidence of a person who was dwarf till age 19, and later growth up to 233cm (7'4)
I wonder how long it will take with modern genetic engineering where we can resume growth in people.
I bet you can raise hell lot of money of someone decides to work on this problem, there are so many short people, short billionaores, dictators in the world who would invest to become taller.
Peter Schultz and team has been working on this problem for more than a decade. His company Ambrx was founded 10 years ago. They've done ok with fundraising, but I'm not sure he raised 'a hell of a lot of money'. Sure the science seems promising, but it has been, and will be slow. I'd expect it to be more complicated than swapping out a couple amino acids and people grow 4 feet and are otherwise healthy. That and I'm pretty sure they are focused on things other needs than making mid-life billionaires and dictators 4 feet taller.
Why would a billionaire or a dictator need to be taller? You already have enough power, status, and respect. It doesn't seem like a worthwhile investment at that point.
It is an apples to oranges comparison: gain of function of microbes is an application of genetic modification, of which introducing novel aminoacids is only a specific advanced technique.
"Because the mice couldn’t make that amino acid on their own, the researchers could control their circadian rhythms by adding or removing the amino acids from the rodents’ drinking water"
Drew Berry has done some mind-blowing animations of how these systems work.
https://youtu.be/IvJrDsRuWxQ - Kinetochore and Mitosis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5AXGS1aL8&list=PL04jnTG4d1... - Playlist of respiration