This takes the principles of gene tinkering, and, just as the pioneers of electronics did, standardises the components so that creating new technologies becomes easier. This century, the descendant of genetic modification has emerged as synthetic biology. Genetic modification has become a mainstay of almost every aspect of the life sciences, and provided innumerable advances in our understanding of how life and diseases work. Humans have been doing something similar for 10,000 years through breeding and farming, but with the advent of DNA editing tools, we were suddenly no longer bound by the limitations of creatures that could have sex. In California in the early 1970s, scientists invented ways to swap chunks of DNA between species, so that they acquired specific characteristics by design. It is this uniformity that spawned the industrial revolution of biotechnology that we are in the throes of today. The same alphabet, the same encryption, the same lexicon are applied in every bacterium or blue whale, in you, a sunflower and a mushroom. And yet only 20 amino acids are encoded by DNA in all life forms. If DNA is an alphabet, then the words it spells out are amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
DOUBLE HELIX DNA CRACKED
The code was systematically cracked in the 1960s, revealing that life is breathtakingly conservative. DNA in living cells, as far as we know, is universal, and combined with Darwin's theory of evolution we have a robust model of how life is, and how it came to be, its origins almost 4bn years ago.ĭNA is a code, a means of storing biological data, in the form of genes. And the same process has been happening continuously in every cell that has ever existed on Earth. This is happening right now inside you as the cells that make up your body divide, at a rate of around 3,000 letters a minute (bacteria can do it 10 times faster). Hence, from one DNA molecule, you can make two identical molecules.
So if you were to split the ladder in two, breaking the paired rungs, then on each of these struts you would have all the information needed to replace the missing one. But A will only pair with T, and C only with G. Each rung of the ladder is made up of a pair of two of the four letters of the DNA alphabet – A, T, C and G. In the past couple of years, the nature of DNA itself has been modified, its alphabet mutated and its function reinvented for non-biological uses.ĭNA's operation is determined by its shape. And now we are entering the post-DNA era. We have seen the emergence of genetic modification and now synthetic biology – for both scientific and commercial gain – each with its own mire of ongoing legal wrangles. Since 1953, biology has evolved into a global industry, with our ever-increasing command over DNA at its core.
0 kommentar(er)
