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A comment on RNAs Galore. Parent comment

Re:RNAs Galore by dragonwriter on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:45PM (#10167711)
> Consider the DNA to be the basic hardware of life ... there has to be software layers that control how, when, where and how much information is to be decoded from the DNA.

That analogy seems kind of backwards from the usual and more natural formulation: DNA is the software (or, rather, the DNA is a storage medium, the information encoded by the base-pair sequences in the DNA is the software -- RNA is another such storage medium), the various bits of biological machinery that take action based on the DNA/RNA coding are the hardware on which that software is run.

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Re:RNAs Galore by pazimzadeh on Thursday September 03, 2015 @06:22PM (#10167864)
Terms like hardware and software are very limited when talking about biology because it seems more like hardware nested inside software nested inside hardware, forever and ever.

Here are some strong generalizations about the cell: DNA by itself does nothing but store information. RNA is a transient store of information and can also perform functions. Proteins primarily perform functions, yet embody the most information about the cell's current live state. Each of these levels runs on and are run by the two other levels.

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