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Hey guys, would this board be a good place to discuss biotech? I've been studying it for a while now and I thought it might interest some people.

>>6666 Damn son, nice get. >biotech Regardless of board, I'd be interested. I wouldn't understand much as I never took more than entry level bio but I'm always eager to at least break ground on new learning

Cloning, how to use it, where to make it happen, and what its implications are. I always welcome some tasty biotech discussion. Bring it on! Personally I have a plan for immortality through cloning. First, implant a brain computer interface like the one neuralink is developing currently. record all available biological and experiential data to a storage device through the implant. Clone self and implant an identical implant with a copy of the collected data. Raise clone as my own child. Become immortal or go into cryo-preservation until such time as I can be repaired. Profit.

>>6669 Yeah, I've studied biology for most of my life and it's my passion I guess. One technology that really seems to be making a change in the field is influencing signal pathways in cells, in fact a lot of modern immunotherapy treatments utilize this now. >>6680 I hope we figure out how a lot of cnidarians revert their cells to their undifferentiated state and repair their DNA too, that would probably have profound effects on aging research.

>>6707 I remember when I was in school and learned all about that. I thought it was fascinating, but i never really could see how it fit in with my life on a personal level, but it raised the ethical question of prolonging life as a society beyond natural life expectancy. I studied biology for 3 yeas before deciding it was not something I wanted to do. one thing that I did think was rather interesting was viral immunizations and gene modification. basically using viruses and reverse transcriptase to add in gene sequences in order to modify organism or provide immunizations against certain disorder. hat might even be something that could be combined with seeing if there is in fact a genetic process that can be taken from cnidarians. just like pGLO (why don't we just make humans glow in the dark? no potential adverse effects except being seen in the dark, and natural bioluminescense)

>>6708 perhaps you should come up with a way to automate the creation of virii code

>>6666 Checked. I'm working on a project right now, trying to grow algea for the eventual purpose of fabrication of biodiesel and potentially even some plastics. I think it'd be cool if you could, for example, process algea biomass into sheets of polycarbonate and use them to build more bioreactors, in a bootstrapping process. I'm thinking it could be very useful in a situation like Peurto Rico was/is in what with the power crisis: you would only need to ship them a small amount of materials and they could bootstrap themselves into sustainable diesel production for generators. All speculation ofc. I'll post over on /delta/ if I get somewhere with it.

>>6713 That sounds incredibly helpful, imagine if we could build vast complexes full of carbon capturing algae. It would be a power production revolution for sure. A project this reminds me of is a concept for trees modified to produce GFP in their leaves and potentially replace street lamps, not that it operates on remotely the same principle but I think they both are interesting for energy use and production.

>>6707 I think being able to revert cells to an undifferentiated state would be a fantastic solution to biological mortality. Unfortunately, if what I have been reading in the literature as of late is anything to go by, whole body gene therapies are still harder than SCNT, and interspecies genomics is still in its infancy. Not knocking the idea, just saying I would love to see some research pointing in the direction of viability. I can provide sources for my opinion if you would like, but it is just that, my opinion based on an admittedly narrow purview. I am merely a biology hobbyist after all. One might call be a bio-hacker, but I hardly deserve such a moniker. :p

>>6715 >>6713 Imagine the possibilities for sustainable autonomous civilizations at sea. As in seasteading! Or maybe under the right circumstances space travel! Algae are very efficiency oxygen producers and nutritious biomass for their weight aren't they?

>>6719 they can be used as fuel aswell, although i think they fufill the biofuel role much better than consumption

>>6720 >>6719 Some species of algea are up to about 30% oil by weight, much more than the corn used for ethanol production (3-4%) and more, even, than an oil producing plant like the oil palm (8-10%). So, all else being equal, it's the ideal choice for producing biofuel or other oil products. I'm not sure about the nutritional aspects of algea. I know there are some species that you can eat, but my gut tells me that land plants that we've been selectively breeding for thousands of years would win that contest. I should note: growing algea in seawater comes with its own issues. The kinds of algea that can resist the salinity of seawater tend to be less productive than the best producing freshwater species, and it's very, very hard to avoid contamination from other species. But an open-water community would be cool as hell, if you could find a way to overcome those challenges.

>>6666 Nice get, Satan. >>6726 Can confirm, participated in a project with a pal to extract some biofuel that originated from algea (Chorella in our case). *Picture unrelated though*

Synthetic biology seems to be where biotech is headed. The field's still in its infancy, but there's already a big collegiate competition and what not. What's rather fascinating is that they've figured out you can build logic gates out of rates of gene expression, so you can build a (generally) predictable regulatory network. I'd love to see what we could push a synthetic RN implanted in a liposome to do. Cell-free/Minimalist cell systems in general are fascinating, too.

>>6753 http://www.sci-news.com/biology/bacterial-tape-recorder-05464.html I agree, synthetic biology is exciting even in its early days. The above is.something I have been getting excited about. It strikes me as a first step on the road to biological brain computer interfaces, that allow directly recording infromation from and downloading to the brain via an entirely biological system, no implants or surgery required. Imagine a mind upload via bacterial interface? Or even better, imagine transferring ones identity information and memories to a bacterial substrate and infecting the world population with it... That would be a wild day for sure.

>>6760 Something that interests me in regards to storing information biologically is that DNA has a ridiculous shelf life compared to current digital methods

>>6804 >>6760 Oh man, imagine the possibilities. You could plant a literal family tree, each member's biography stored in a grafted on branch. I wonder if anyone's come up with a way to encrypt information in DNA yet. Could be interesting. I also wonder how well it'd function as secondary memory for a biocomputer. soykaf'd be cash if you could build one.

>>6816 Encoding information in DNA has been done before, and from the little I've read it seems to be fairly reliable. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3672958/ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract;jsessionid=B1FB4EF33063A433C5E7D4CFD02E8A6A.f02t02 Storage in a living organism could prove much more complex, since living things tend to spend a lot of time modifying any DNA they can get their hands on both intentionally and accidentally. But it would be sick to have a culture of simple bacteria encoding a massive collection of literature than you can spread simply by sharing easy to maintain cell cultures.

>>6822 Histonation and methylation would add a whole new world of difficulty to storing data on DNA, it could probably make it really secure too though.