Quote:
Originally Posted by StephenM
Interestingly when they first introduced this synthetic genome it failed to replicate, and in just 3 months they were able to identify a single nucleotide error that prevented replication!
|
Stephen,
When I read the Press Release about the original error that made the cell fail
to replicate, it instantly reminded me of a similar problem that anyone who
has attempted to write a compiler for a programming language is likely to have faced.
I am sure anyone who has done an undergraduate course in compiler design where
one of the tasks was to write your own compiler will relate to this.
When you create a compiler for some programming language, historically
you first wrote it in some other high level language or even assembly language
first. You then wrote another version of the complier in its own language.
So for example, if you were creating a C compiler for a particular CPU
architecture, you might first write a C compiler in assembler and then a C
compiler in C. What you would then do is compile your C compiler written
in C using your C compiler written in assembler. This would then result in
a new executable. Using this executable, you would then attempt to compile
the C complier written in C with itself. At this point you might typically encounter
a bug and need to correct it. Once you finally got the C compiler to compile itself,
as a final test you would then make sure that the binary executable image created
as a result of compiling itself would be identical to the binary executable image
that was used to compile it. You would thus reach a stable executable
analogous to a bug free self replicating DNA sequence.
Best regards
Gary