[ExI] Evolution

[The Avantguardian]

On Friday, May 22, 2020, 03:45:07 PM PDT, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: 

> Completely innocent and ignorant question:  how far are we from examining a gene and predicting what it will do?  If we could do that, we could design genes, splice them in and do our own evolution, eh?  bill w

We are further along than we were when I was in grad school but we are not quite there yet. Figuring out the function of a gene based on its sequence data is largely based upon predicting what shape the resulting RNA or protein will fold into. We have had some success at this with different approaches, but none of these approaches has been terribly reliable across all genes. Here is a slideshow that kind of summarizes the current state of the art.

http://www.sfu.ca/~eemberly/phys347/lectures/5_RNA_Protein_folding.pdf

Stuart LaForge