DNA as Code

Is electron some sort of synthetic genome compiler?

I get the joke, but it's also an incredibly interesting topic to ponder. Remember "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? Now consider that DNA itself needs a complex biomolecular machine to "compile" it into cells and organisms, and that this also embeds in them copies of the "compiler" itself. This raises the question of whether, and how much, information needed to build the organism is not explicitly encoded anywhere in the DNA itself, and instead accumulates in th

Not sure if it's what you meant, but DNA Computing is a whole field!https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing

Graph theory is applicable for exploring biochemical pathways, and all manner of statistics, ML, and metaheuristics are useful.We can't "code" an organism, unfortunately. That won't be possible for some time. Venter has inserted a bacterial genome into a preexisting cell and called it "synthetic life", but this is hyperbole. He essentially just swapped out the operating system if you will. Both the genome and the cell were preexisting. This would be impossible to do for a eukaryotic cell with

I'm not an expert, but if it's a chip that just synthesizes DNA from a sequence of base pairs, isn't what you're asking similar to making a computer that can't be used to perform evil? I suspect that computing if a given sequence is usable in a pathogen is equivalent to the halting problem. And practically, it seems that a lot of computational resources are required to figure out what a protein does, even for common cases.

I'm a little surprised there's not a complete toolchain for DNA by now, including assemblers, compilers and linkers, given that the human genome project was completed decades ago.You still need living things for the runtime, but hasn't AlphaFold basically solved that problem too?Programming in DNA is like programming in assembly language, but a 7.5 KB assembly language program is well within the reach of a lot of people. Has anyone tried to write a 7.5 KB living thing or DN

First, DNA is not software and second, before we all get too excited about "Arudino for organisms", have a look at the actual parts:http://partsregistry.org/CatalogThe biological world is very different from the world of man-made devices and you cannot expect to easily engineer, and even more so, to "program" things using DNA the way you build something from NAND gates or computer instructions - in engineering we strive very har

Could this mean a step towards biological computers?

Will DNA be Turing Complete? :)Not the same, but quite related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JNSpMhJLvg

Forgive my limited knowledge of biochemistry but isn’t the gist of it that nucleotides code for and combine to form amino acids which when put in certain sequences form enzymes and proteins whose structure then enables some function so it is much like the paper tape model of a computer except instead of paper with holes in it you have a polymer with a few types of “hooks” that allows it to fold into an origami machine that can manipulate or join with other bits of paper to do things? This is dif