DNA as Code

Over the holidays I was chatting with my brother the biophysicist about his research. Roughly speaking, he is trying to create DNA sequences that encode molecular motors. I was trying to understand what it meant to hack DNA from a programmer's perspective. Today I read this, which is in a very similar spirit. Two interesting data points from our conversation: one, the code my brother is "writing" is a few kilobase long, and could be represented in well under one kB of binary data. Two, his edit/compile/run cycle is about three weeks long, although he can do a dozen or so in parallel.

I thought these numbers were impressively small, especially that you could produce a working motor from a few hundred bytes of information (try that in Autocad...). He thought of them as huge, because they made it infeasible to brute-force the design by generating all the random variations and seeing which ones worked.

I'm certainly glad it doesn't take me three weeks to do a new build...

Comments

[Niall Ross]

You might be amused by the latest Smalltalk coding contest which is right in this domain. I too felt that some genetics problems were capable of being solved more easily than current approaches allowed. Click my name URL to get the details.