Sea Urchins' DNA Code Mapped
Published Fri, Nov 17 2006 11:33 PM
An international team of nearly 250 scientists reported Friday that they had determined the exact order of all 814 million letters of DNA code that carry the instructions for making and maintaining a sea urchin.
If you think that's relevant only to scuba divers and sea otters, you're wrong. Among life-forms that lack backbones, these spiky critters -- which are kissing cousins of starfish and can live for more than 100 years -- are our closest relatives. They are more similar to us than fruit flies or worms, those classic laboratory workhorses that for decades have provided insights into human biology and genetics.
Read the rest of the article in the Washington Post.
I think it's pretty cool that scientists have been able to map the DNA of sea urchins. That makes a couple of creatures that they've managed to do this with. It's pretty impressive.
Somehow though, I don't think we're going to see any artificial sea urchins in our aquaria anytime soon. Jurassic Park is still only science fiction.
Scientists have managed to clone various types of animals, but they still need a few things to pull of this modern day miracle. They need living cells from a host animal and living DNA from the animal to be cloned to insert into them. With mammals they need a bit more too. They need a living animal to raise the cloned embryo.
It's sort of like a person installing a software package they bought in the store onto a computer that they also bought in a store, complete with operating system. If the software and the computer are compatible, you end up with a useful result. That doesn't make you a software developer though.
Even taking the source code to a program and building it with a suite of development tools doesn't make you a software developer. Building a program from the source code doesn't require you to understand the source code, but it is a step above being able to install a program from a CD.
I have yet to hear of the scientist that could take the base components of DNA, string them together into the proper sequence and create life, even if they know the entire DNA sequence of an animal. Until they can do that, all they are doing is copying the source code.
They're getting a lot closer to running the compiler though.
I'm not so sure that's a good thing. I've been a software developer for over half of my life. I have yet to meet a software developer or designer that didn't write buggy code, and we have a pretty good understanding of what we're doing when we do that. With biology, we have a long way to go before we get past just copying the code, let alone reading it, understanding it, and knowing how to write it from scratch.
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