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.<p>Drew Berry has done some mind-blowing animations of how these systems work.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/IvJrDsRuWxQ" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/IvJrDsRuWxQ</a> - Kinetochore and Mitosis<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5AXGS1aL8&list=PL04jnTG4d1nZuxdfgL85V27NPjFTl025Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5AXGS1aL8&list=PL04jnTG4d1...</a> - Playlist of respiration
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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid</a>
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?<p>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.<p>It seems new research believes this is not to be case.<p>We've evidence of a person who was dwarf till age 19, and later growth up to 233cm (7'4)<p>I wonder how long it will take with modern genetic engineering where we can resume growth in people.<p>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.<p>So is anyone working on it?
rodents first, humans next as usual.<p>from the article:<p>"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"