Photoshop for DNA

pafischer writes "Forbes is reporting on a Biotech startup company trying to make DNA manipulation as easy as Photoshop. From the article: 'The goal is to move from having to merely tweak the proteins that are used as biotech drugs to being able to design them, even taking material from multiple organisms and using them to create new, functional genes.'"

Ain't gonna happen

[nanoakron]

Hate to say it, but this sounds like a pipedream. They want to 'take the proteins and tweak them' an dthen have a computer program spit out the DNA required to make that protein.

Well whoop-de-do. I'd like to make a computer that can generate wormholes. Doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Firstly, protein modelling is notoriously complex. Remember folding@home? http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]
That's right - hundreds of thousands of computers cracking the problem of 12 amino acid chains. That's an oligopeptide, sort of like a 'protein lite'. Real proteins are hundreds to thousands of amino acids long.

IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers were even specifically designed with protein folding simulations in mind - read http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/ [ibm.com].

So this company seems to be doing the following

1 Come up with nifty, but blindingly obvious, idea
2 Crack the age-old problem of accurately simulating protein folding
3 Profit!!!

It's just that step one is literally so obvious that you could ask a kid. And step 2 is so notoriously complex that I don't expect this company to amount to anything more than a plughole for research grants.

-Nano.