Betting on dinosaurs was Re: [extropy-chat] Formulating a bet

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

> On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 09:15:07PM +0100, ben wrote:
> > Hatch an egg?
> >
> > This made me smile.
> >
> > Which currently existing animal is going to lay a T-Rex egg?

### I doubt that designing a carrier animal for making the eggs will be
necessary. To make a T.rex you will need to stitch together millions of small
fragments of DNA sequence - the tiny amounts of highly-degraded DNA present in
the bones might be even not amenable to PCR amplification, and might have to be
read by AFM, which is still not a well-developed technology, especially given
the likely high concentration of depurinated bases and all kinds of nasty
crosslinks.

This implies that it will be impossible to reconstruct the whole sequence
outright - any areas with even short repeats will break the contig, and you
might end up with thousands of separate contigs which cannot be bridged. So, to
reconstruct the functional sequence, you will need to do extensive modeling of
the predicted proteins to find the contig combinations yielding functional (and
therefore plausible) proteins, protein networks, cellular networks, all the way
to a functional animal. In effect, you will need to recreate the T.rex in
silico before ever attempting to synthesize the DNA.

If you are smart enough to reconstruct the sequence, synthesizing it and
introducing into a host cell should be much easier. Growing them on a synthetic
yolk will be easier still. There will no need for an animal to hatch them.

Rafal