DNA Compiler
Another interesting TED talk. Paul Rothemund discusses how genetic engineers can fold proteins by writing the sequence of the DNA and compiling it with a DNA compiler. The result? Well, you can come up with whatever you want – from simple figures to actual living organisms.
This topic was introduced to me by Ramsesoriginal on a discussion within the House of Hackers network. When I saw the video I thought that it is all good but they still write the DNA sequences with very simple language, which can be compared to an extend to the machine language, although much primitive. So now I am thinking: can’t we just write a high-level compiler? Sure it is not very hard to write the language parser. That’s easy! So, I guess that we, as hackers should take on this challenge and write one just for fun. Also having a simple interpreter could be very beneficial so that we see the result before executing the program through the DNA compiler.
Do you think that’s a good idea and should we do it? More over, do you think it is feasible?
Wow.. i never tought I’m gonna read my name on this sites.. I feel honored. Anyway, there already is some sort of gui to “design bacteria”: also fatured in a TED talk, it seems pretty drag-and-drop designing your microbe basing on predefined modules.
But it would be nice to have a possibility to actually write a program without being bound to this gui/modules. Creating a DNA programming language shure would be a fun thing! Maybe someone could extend the idea to write some sort of “genetic operating system”, so that coding dna could be even simpler and much more fun. Ican already hear the geeks trying to port Linux on Microbes ;D
(I just wanted to notice that somehow the commenting system stripped my nickname o.O
writing the actual language for constructing the DNA sequences is trivial, as long as we understand what these sequences mean :)
kewl guys! I was spellbound, and my DNA rearranged for a second show – “WOW” before they were back on track.
My pin point is where it is starting and where it gonna lead us? Nutshell, what is the driving force behind it & where it gonna lead us .oO(I hope just not DNA design & graphics)