It's alive! Alive!

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Starchild


It's not. Synthetic biology isn't really well known in the general public but its becoming very hot and very sexy in the biological sciences field. The only problem is that as a field its advancing so fast that everyone is having trouble keeping up.

They've been doing some fantastic stuff already such as constructing the minimal genetic content required for something to be alive, transplants of whole genomes (both of which this article builds on), construction of unique genetic and metabolic pathways (mostly at the moment just to show its possible), the expansion of the genetic code from 4 bases to more and the incorporation of non-natural amino acids into proteins to add novel function.

I'd love to get into synthetic biology in the future but at this rate, its going to go from a cutting edge experimental field to a technical discipline with astonishing speed.

Damn, now there's a field that sounds like it has become extremely interesting but was in extreme infancy when I was a student. Shows how quickly things move in the biosciences.

[Slade Wilson]

could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming

My god, how the propaganda begins. This was a great touch

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Actually, ...

Until you can tell me how this could even remotely be used to run my car or how burning a carbon based life form for fuel wouldn't add more carbon into the air, I'm gonna have to call this story a great big heaping pile of bulls#it.

[Japher]

who said anything about burning them? Why not burn whatever their waste is when you feed 'em something? Like a million tiny little cows in your gas tank, you shove grass down their, they eat it, and fill your tank with methane!

[Elok]

I withhold judgment until I find out why this thing was originally named "genitalium." Did it grow on crotches like a yeast infection, or what?

[Japher]

If I invented a synthetic bacteria I would name is cockafillmeup

[snoopy369]

Burning? What are you talking about?

Imagine a bacteria, with a modified metabolic cycle that instead of using O2, it uses CO2 and fixes it in some larger structure (especially if it did one better and also included breaking down airborne organic pollutants) that then precipitated out of the atmosphere harmlessly (a sugar, say).

Imagine a bacteria that metabolized plastics, eliminating a major problem (landfills overflowing), and of course metabolized them into octane (the major component of gasoline). Or metabolized grass clippings into oil.

None of these are practical (though not strictly impossible) at the moment, but that's where they're heading. The former solution is actually not unreasonable at the moment, and may well be the best solution to global warming (if it exists).

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Japher
who said anything about burning them? Why not burn whatever their waste is when you feed 'em something? Like a million tiny little cows in your gas tank, you shove grass down their, they eat it, and fill your tank with methane!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6040000/newsid_6046900/6046962.stm

[Japher]

you expect us to follow links?

[DinoDoc]

Cow farts are bad for the enviroment.

[Japher]

Not if properly harvested. If we could tap a cow's ass we could probably power a small city.

[Darius871]

WTF, the man upstairs already gave us enough of a kick in the pants for eating from the tree of knowledge, and now we have to tempt fate by messing with the tree of life too?

This ain't gonna fly man, we're screwed. No wonder the clock resets in 2012.

[Omni Rex Draconis]

It doesn't matter what you burn or how you burn it. You take a molecule with high energy bonds and you trade them in for lower energy states. That's where the power comes from.

If the burned fuel was carbon-based, then the best you can hope for is to release C02 or soot (straight carbon). But this is only a pollution problem if we put more in the atmosphere than we take out. We burn a lot of oil and coal and do nothing at the moment.

A biological source of fuel means that the carbon is getting sucked out of the atmosphere and converted to fuel, and then getting burned and returned to the atmosphere in it's low energy state. Net pollution is zero.

Snoopy - I have had the same idea occur to me for a science fiction setting. But while having sugar rain sounds cool, what purpose would it serve in the real world?

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Omni Rex Draconis
But while having sugar rain sounds cool, what purpose would it serve in the real world?

Get it to rain rum, too, and then go hang out in a field of mint

[Omni Rex Draconis]

Hmmm...

Alcohol is more volatile than water, so it wouldn't condense properly into the water droplets; it would rise higher before cooling sufficiently to condense out. The party would most likely start as all ages and then take the usual paths to eventual unconsciousness. Might work, after all.

Probably have to do some sort weather control to make it happen in timely fashion, and they are already upset with us for making life.

Best not to push it.