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Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by whoopdedo on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @06:18PM (#11957480)
> Most of the mystery essential genes are vague cell wall proteins. Probably what is going on is that if you knock out too many of these genes, you lose cell wall turgidity and the cell becomes nonviable. So what is important is not so much which of these genes you have, but how many of them you have.

Sounds like dependency hell. Gene A only works in the presence of Gene B which only works when there's Gene C which needs Gene A. Knock any one of them out and everything breaks.

Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by rosser on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @09:11PM (#11958249)
> Sounds like dependency hell.

Random mutations are like that. It's almost like no-one was planning out how these things should work, and whatever did work stuck.

Weird, huh?

Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by tadfisher on Thursday June 23, 2016 @02:23AM (#11959199)
In other words, God writes spaghetti code.
Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by Eerie on Thursday June 23, 2016 @03:43AM (#11959426)
Praise his noodly appendage!
Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by amitprayal on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:11AM (#11959878)
God writes code that writes code that writes code ... that writes spaghetii code
Re:In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery by jhou2 on Thursday June 23, 2016 @12:06AM (#11958788)
In this simplified system, the number of these cell wall genes in the genome is proportional to the quantity of the cell wall proteins produced. It's more of a quantity issue, rather than a dependency issue. For example, having more developers usually results in more lines of code written in a given period of time, especially in enterprise. The quality of code might be questionable but the quantity is usually there.