New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

Re:New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and... by dboreham on Thursday October 17, 2019 @05:42PM (#21286619)

We will eventually find that there's the equivalent of JPEG encoding (plus SSL and ECC) and that today we're doing the equivalent of someone with no knowledge of SSL or JPEG staring at a tcpdump trace of a browser loading an image over https, trying to make sense of the resulting hex dump.

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Re:New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and... by theLotusGambit on Thursday October 17, 2019 @06:56PM (#21287118)

Trying to figure out how a single compressed/encrypted buffer works given only it and its resulting image is certainly an unwinnable task, but increase the sample size to a few million or billion and I don't see why the algorithm couldn't eventually be cracked.

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Re:New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and... by q6467655 on Thursday October 17, 2019 @06:40PM (#21287007)

Can you elaborate - I’ve always been fascinated hearing CS interpretations of biological processes.

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Re:New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and... by kevin_thibedeau on Thursday October 17, 2019 @08:16PM (#21287554)

DNA methylation acts as a form of error correction analogous to parity.

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Re:New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and... by wjn0 on Thursday October 17, 2019 @08:54PM (#21287727)

If genes are the data, then methylation is more like an additional piece of metadata directing the cell (potentially different across cells) how to use the data. One possible use for this metadata is potentially error correction, but it does much more than that.

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Re:New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and... by JohnBerea on Thursday October 17, 2019 @11:33PM (#21288427)

And alternate splicing is a form of compression, where exons store the repetitive parts of genes only once, to be combined to make many proteins.

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Re:New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and... by meowface on Thursday October 17, 2019 @07:10PM (#21287209)

Great analogy. This might be the case with some of physics, too.

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