Artificial DNA Replicates and 'Evolves' 126
ananyo writes "Scientists have demonstrated that several lab-made variants of DNA can store and transmit information much like the genuine article. DNA is made up of nucleic acid bases — labelled A, C, G and T — on a backbone made of phosphates and the sugar deoxyribose. The artificial polymers, dubbed XNAs, carry the normal genetic 'alphabet' on a backbone made using different sugars. The researchers engineered enzymes that transcribed DNA into the various XNAs, then back into new DNA strands. Faithful genetic transmission over successive DNA-to-XNA cycles allowed researchers to select for only those XNAs that attached to certain target proteins from a pool of random samples — a process akin to evolution over multiple generations (abstract). The research confirms for the first time that replication, heredity and evolution can take place in artificial DNA-like molecules."
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Only if we combine it with toasters.
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Current theory holds that it took about 3 billion years to go from nucleic acids to complex multicellular organisms.
Yeah, but current theory also holds that nobody was trying to do that on purpose.
[cue Tennessee jokes]
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Membranes aren't plasma they're fatty acids. Pretty easy to do this part too, they're self organizing. That is of you introduce individual fatty acid molecules into water they clump together and form sheets, they keep on going and because of the geometry of the molecule they end up forming, wait for it, perfect spheres.
Our celllar membanes have two layers of these, the "bilayer phospholipid membrane". Actually all animals too, plants have cell walls.
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And for the record, fatty acid is NOT a synonym for phospholipid. Fatty acids by themselves are nonpolar and hydrophobic. Introduce them to water and they'll clump up together. In order to create micelles, liposomes, or a plasma membrane/cell membrane [wikipedia.org] spontaneously in water, they need to be amphipathic. They need to have a polar, hydrophillic region. The fatty acid chains are attached to polar head groups. The p
Info library for the ages stored in organisms? (Score:2)
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Perhaps one day we'll realize that everything our alien forefathers knew was written in our DNA -- or cats (you know those Egyptians sure loved them). The code said that we had to overcome the religious superstitions and start venturing into space as a species or risk total annihilation.
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The code says "this organism evolved naturally"
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No because creationism specifically refers to the belief that the universe was created by a non-natural being. This has nothing to do with the realm of human artifice of any realm/genre.
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No, you still aren't. In fact, it's the opposite. By showing that we can create DNA from scratch, we're showing that no supernatural intervention is necessary.
Actually, this has no bearing on supernatural intervention or not. It simply means that scientists were able to make organic molecules that replicate like DNA does. It speaks nothing to the actual process that took place for that to happen in nature.
It is just as valid to argue that since man was able to do it, there is not supernatural intervention required as it is to argue that since man is outside the parameters of the created environment, man acted as the supernatural intervention. In other words, th
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Re:Info library for the ages stored in organisms? (Score:4, Insightful)
You want to provide proof of spontaneous self-replicating protein generation? Go find some XNA laying around outside.
There's no need, the Miller-Urey experiment neatly showed that protein building blocks can self-assemble in nature. The leap to self-replication isn't as far a leap as that between nothing and amino acids.
The fact that these people have created a synthetic analogue to DNA does not prove that a creator diety created the real stuff any more than a Tesla coil making long electrical arcs would lead one to believe that Thor throws every natural lightning bolt.
For my two penneth worth, both you and the parent are wrong, though frankly you're the more wrong of the two. kurzweilfreak is correct for the wrong reasons while you are wrong, but for equally wrong reasons. In essence, the parent is saying that a creator deity need not exist because humans can create X; you are saying that because humans made X there must be a creator. There's nothing to say a creator and human ingenuity in recreating His/Her/Its creations are mutually exclusive, and there's nothing to say that because certain complex creations have not been seen to arise in nature in human timescales they couldn't without divine intervention.
Still, I'm talking out of my arse; It's not like a have a doctorate in biochemistry (I really don't). I just get irritated by people taking interesting but relatively small - as compared to, say, DNA itself - discoveries and using them to "prove" the existence of $GOD. Personally I don't see a problem in using a deity to explain how the Universe in all its splendour was set in motion; I confess that the idea of a cosmic finger flicking the first atoms like dominoes appeals to my love of whimsy. I do, however, say that you can't reconcile evolution with a deity creating - hence creationism the Earth and all creatures thereon in their current form, since there's a more than ample fossil record that says otherwise. I'm not going to get into the cop-out that is ID, mainly because it's just that - a cop-out for school boards - but also because I have difficulty in believing in any "intelligent" designer that would reinvent the wheel. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Info library for the ages stored in organisms? (Score:5, Funny)
My codes says "Be sure to drink your ovaltine"
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+1 Funny
But why this obsession with saving the species? Why not try to save the family or order?
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But why this obsession with saving the species? Why not try to save the family or order?
We're humans. We consider ourselves more valuable than the rest of the Earth's creatures combined. If we do not survive then the rest of it doesn't matter because we won't be around to see it.
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At the least the idea is that the other critters are still interesting examples of genetics and of working organisms that we are still learning things from both of ourselves and of how organisms can be designed/engineered and exhibit good and bad points of different types of genetics.
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But why this obsession with saving the species? Why not try to save the family or order?
We're humans. We consider ourselves more valuable than the rest of the Earth's creatures combined. If we do not survive then the rest of it doesn't matter because we won't be around to see it.
Of course, if the rest doesn't survive, we won't be around to see it, either. We really do have a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the planet.
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The last time I tried to help a chimpanzee, it tore my face off. Sorry, after that, I'm a one-species guy.
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Re:Info library for the ages stored in organisms? (Score:5, Funny)
The code said that we had to overcome the religious superstitions and start venturing into space as a species or risk total annihilation.
Incorrect; the actual message is as follows:
We
Apologize
For
The
Inconvenience
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Well done, you beat me to it! But why you are not modded up is a mystery....
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The day when Hitchhiker's Guide is 'to nerdy' for /. will be a sign of the end times.
(At least the end times of this site.)
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Or maybe the code was more like "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma."
You never know.
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Nah, it's just a video of an ugly female alien who tells us to try and just all get along.
Needless to say, everyone ignores her.
P.S. Are you still the original asshat who bought the account in order to get instinctive upmods from the mouth-breathers, or has he resold it?
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Dresden Codak explores the implications of this very subject.
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/07/12/fabulous-prizes/ [dresdencodak.com]
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No. Unless there's a selective advantage towards maintaining a specific stretch of DNA you can expect it to accumulate mutations or deletions and be selected out of the genome.
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This is not true. DNA replication isn't perfect. Mutations will accrue.
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Umm, aren't you agreeing with him? You said "mutations will accrue", he said "..accumulate mutations...".
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That's the crappy /. threading, hiding the downmodded AC from you.
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Thanks. I browse at 1, I guess I wish it would show me the posts lower than that inline, but only take up one line that I would have to expand, perhaps. (I know it shows "1 post below your threshold" links at the bottom of subthreads.)
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You can only "expect" it to be selected out of the genome over an infinite period of time. Over a finite period, even if it is not beneficial, it is just as likely to stay as it is to go.
Let me see, you're claiming that
a) expectation values cannot be calculated for finite intervals
and
b) the probability of a certain state of a part of the genome remaining constant for an arbitrary period of time is exactly 50%?
That probably deserves a +1 Funny.
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No, but you can store it in an amoeba.
Replication (Score:1)
Take it one step further, if we start breeding some computers, they could evolve to become more and more powerful while we all just relax and play video games. As we all get lazier and lazier, this is the eventual outcome; we will become obsolete when we stop adapting and the key limitation for any computer system is that the system is not able to improve itself. With this kind of DNA replication theory tested and proved, we now can use this to facilitate a computer chip that improves itself.
Fear Not (Score:4, Insightful)
With this kind of DNA replication theory tested and proved, we now can use this to facilitate a computer chip that improves itself.
What is the learning environment that defines what "improves" means?
I've studied artificial intelligence extensively and there's a whole lot of effort going into reinforcement learning, genetic annealing, etc. But the key thing to remember with DNA is that the Earth provided this environment for it to be tested in and be given feedback. The feedback was and still is exceptionally harsh in that you either died or adapted. On top of that, the DNA lead to things that eventually competed with each other.
The problem with computer chips is that there is no fundamental death/life reward system unless we as humans implement it. And there will always be a need for us to do this because nature doesn't care about logic gates, we do. If you make a set of chips to provide an environment for incubating and reward or punishing the first set of chips, you merely have another layer where humans must evaluate and instruct the chips as to what it is that we want.
Faithful genetic transmission over successive DNA-to-XNA cycles allowed researchers to select for only those XNAs that ...
Unfortunately, in order to impose your will (no matter how lazy you wish to be) you still must define your will. And I think you'll see that it becomes a major effort when trying to set up automated systems like you propose.
Simply said: define "improves." Putting the chips outside and pitting them against each other in nature isn't gonna do it. The ability to direct harmful radiation will probably win out over gigahertz or logic gates per area.
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The metric of improvement will probably be its ability to kill all humans. It's an understudied area of AI that is full of potential advances.
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For any AI to substantially compete in the arena of killing humans, they must first overtake the leader in that arena -- humanity.
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They wouldn't even have to 'kill' all humans. For example they could just prevent human reproduction.
Don't despair (Score:2)
"The problem with computer chips is that there is no fundamental death/life reward system unless we as humans implement it. And there will always be a need for us to do this because nature doesn't care about logic gates, we do. If you make a set of chips to provide an environment for incubating and reward or punishing the first set of chips, you merely have another layer where humans must evaluate and instruct the chips as to what it is that we want."
Don't despair, this is how humans have hade breeding prog
Impressed (Score:2)
The research confirms for the first time that replication, heredity and evolution can take place in artificial DNA-like molecules.
That is pretty impressive. Up til now I was firmly of the opinion that chemistry only worked properly in natural molecules.
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I think this might count as biology, not chemistry... (Although it's right at the overlap.)
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It's both, just because a chemical process takes place in a biological context doesn't mean it stops being chemistry.
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It's physics~
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It is Mathmatics ...
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When you get far enough all of the different natural sciences are just pieces of the puzzle of how stuff has been working.
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You're all wrong. It's turtles, all the way down.
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No, sorry. Math is just the language used to express the ideas of physics.
You can't reduce a natural science to a formal science.
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That's abiogenesis (Score:2)
The researchers just created a very simple life form (if it evolves, it is alive for any usefull pourpose here) from molecules that are expected to be created at random at the earlier times of our planet. Now somebody just needs to calculate the probability of those molecules appearing and interacting anywhere on the planet, and we have a lower value for the probability of life appearing on Earth.
Of course, that's different life from we, as we likely come from the evolution of RNA molecules.
Labeled A, G, C, T (Score:1)
Is it that hard to type out adenine guanine cytosine and thymine? Even my cereal box has thymine written on the side!
Spongiform cure? (Score:2, Interesting)
The ability to "breed" chemicals that bond to specific proteins sounds like it could cure a boatload of previously incurable diseases. I'm not sure that is what the researchers are going for, but to me, this sounds like "miracle cure" type stuff.
Bacteria/virus/tumor cells/prions go in, perfectly tailored antibody components come out. Attach some highly reactive oxides/chlorides and you have a targeted antibiotic. At least that's how the science fiction version of this would go.
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At the same time, you have some incredibly well targeted toxins. Imagine a researcher discovering the unique enough markers for certain families or racial groups (if such a thing exists).
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>>At the same time, you have some incredibly well targeted toxins. Imagine a researcher discovering the unique enough markers for certain families or racial groups (if such a thing exists).
>Sssh, we can't let Time Hitler get wind of this.
Time Hitler has already won. Haven't you ever wondered why there's only one extant species of hominid left, one with such limited genetic diversity that we're practically clones of each other?
Re:Spongiform cure? (Score:4, Informative)
We can already tailor antibodies to particular protiens. The issue is that cancer cells, bacteria and viruses are complicated. Their populations change under selective pressure from antibodies so that the protiens that were useful targets beocome useless, etc. While we are finding highly conserved genes to target it is non trivial.
I, for one (Score:1, Funny)
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I was hoping someone else would think of this. I wish I had some mod points for you.
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Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!
--Thomas
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The resulting debate should be VERY entertaining.
I'm leaning more towards 'stupid' than entertaining.
I don't think so (Score:2)
Since when science says that intelligence cannot induce evolution? I don't think any scientist would be surprised as you suggested. God-like intelligence will certainly be aware of the laws of nature and be able to create whatever....the issues with the God hypothesis lie elsewhere. Who is the evolutionist who says that "intelligence did it" is not a hypothesis to be considered? Of course it is - this is where Darwin (and the ones before him) started. "Argument of design" rings a bell? It used to be called
more like intelligent design than evolution... (Score:2)
FTFS: "...allowed researchers to select for only those XNAs that attached to certain target proteins from a pool of random samples — a process akin to evolution over multiple generations."
It sounds overreaching to call this "evolution" if the researchers are selecting the better-performing samples. Incredibly cool, amazing breakthrough, but not evolution...
Re:more like intelligent design than evolution... (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds overreaching to call this "evolution" if the researchers are selecting...
Artificial selection and natural selection are equally valid ways of inducing evolution. Without some selection process, it's just random variation, with no trend.
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Oh dear, you had to go and say that. Now we'll have to listen to more of each side's fanaticists going on and on instead of them sitting down and doing some real scientific work. Reminds me of climate change. *ducks*
No, really - the summary did that. This is not akin to evolution over multiple generations. It might fit Darwin's definition, but today we would just call this "selection". Evolution has come to be known as something much different and highly political. Selection (artificial or natural) is just a basic process that can be readily observed by anyone.
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Functionally? No difference. The only difference is in how the execution of the function happens. In the case of artifical selection, the selection is deliberately designed whereas in natural selection the system and the results over time are not deliberately designed.
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Another way to put it is artifical selection is staged (by people :P). Natural selection happens in the wild.
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Natural selection trends towards adaptation to a particular environment and the other organisms in it.
Artificial selection trends towards adaptation to a particular collection of memes, which have undergone a parallel and not entirely natural selection of their own prior to their interaction with the genes in question. It's, like, an extra layer of weird, and sometimes results in organisms that can't survive without help.
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Yes, evolution, it's just that instead of natural environmental forces determining fitness, it's the scientist. Darwin certainly saw artificial selection (animal breeding) as a form of evolution, and even used it as an example.
Here's a hint. Genes have no brains. They have no way of knowing that they're being selected for or against by, say, colder winters, or because a scientist is invoking an arbitrary set of standards. In either case, it is evolutionary forces shaping the hereditary units.
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Faithful genetic transmission and evolution. (Score:2)
No, faithful genetic transmission is the exact opposite of the mutation necessary for a process akin to evolution.
Re:Faithful genetic transmission and evolution. (Score:4, Interesting)
DNA XNA (Score:2)
So if we can engineer different forms of XNA that are compatible with DNA replication, we can build some additional functions into them. Like the ability to pattern match strings of XNA based on magnetic or electrical properties. Think about genetic RFID tags.
Since it might be possible to introduce these tagged sugar molecules through the food supply, the day will come when the TSA contracts to supply all your kids their school lunches.
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I'm far more worried what companies like Monsanto could do with this.
However, if they can be easily engineered, and not just replicate existing DNA through a selection process, which seems to be the first step, I see some pretty radical possibilities for medicinal use, replacing or augmenting faulty or damaged DNA.
Until the religious get their panties in a knot about messing with creation, that is.
XNAs (Score:2)
I've dabbled with XNAs before. They start out cornflower blue, and eventually evolve into video games.
Replicants (Score:1)
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Are we Gods now? (Score:2)
God want his share of the profits now....
artificial DNA (Score:1)
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This doesn't sound so great: (Score:1)
A material's just being "sticky" is no kind of confirmation of the sequence uniformity. They would have to be sequenced to confirm this.
The article only provides the most superficial description, and this is Science and Nature, though it also smacks of som
Proof of Syn Life (Score:1)
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Define life. Creating self-replicating chemicals that work in a completely artificial environment is not life.
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Here it comes (Score:1)
Oh no, here comes Micro$oft and Nathan (Score:2)
XNA is awesome, can't wait to see silverlight ver (Score:2)
:p
The glass is half full (Score:2)
When your self-replication is imperfect, just claim that it also has 'evolution' included.
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MAFIA shill:
- I think that G.O.D. is fully entitled to receive the fruits of His work! And surely his product is way superior to any cheap derivatives! I mean, look at "insert name of hot celebrity here"!
Anti-MAFIA dude:
- G.O.D. should do well to promote his products without the help of the corporations! That is why He is starving - have you seen the contracts? Go indie, G.O.D. !
Anonymous coward (agent from the North Korean propaganda center):
- G.O.D. does not exists! This is a plot of the imperialists to d