Synthetic Life

Scientific American: Synthetic Life [ BIOTECHNOLOGY ]
Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines

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A very cool 5 page article on the topic of synthetic life. Well, really, it talks about building machines using DNA, and proteins, and whatnot. One of the items that interested me was the part about mututation. Through generations, the DNA machines mutate. This is normal biologic behavior. On one side, this has been used to actually improve the performance of a machine by letting it happen and only selecting those machines that had the correct behvior. On the other hand, in the open, the system quickly degrades to not working at all. What is really interesting is the virus, by definition, have solved this problem. They tend to be able to replicate without losing their primary goal. Why is that? I think answering that question will be enlightening for both organic machine engineering and virus fighting. Imagine having to keep up with your antivirus software definitions so you don't get sick. Of course, if the distribution method was in water, it could just be a matter of making sure you drink enough water... The other part that was interesting was one of the example uses. This was building plants that would glow when around TNT. I think it's amusing that they can build stuff so apparently easily that just glows. Where are the designer glowing plants now? Wouldn't a glowing spider plant, for instance, be cool? ;)