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0 pointsnextos2y ago0 comments

It's an interesting endeavor, but there are some obvious safety concerns.

Within Prokaryotes, there is a lot of horizontal gene transfer. What if some of the synthetic sequences get into other organisms and spread out?

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_yb2s2y ago

Those genes would have to confer an evolutionary advantage or they would immediately be discarded/selected against. The chances of that happening are nil… we’re not going to come up with something more useful to bacteria than billions of years of natural selection. Synthetic biology with organisms produced to generate small molecules useful for humans is widely practiced but has the opposite problem- all of the engineering changes to the cells are constantly being selected against, and revert on their own.

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0 pointsnextos2y ago0 comments

It's an interesting endeavor, but there are some obvious safety concerns.

Within Prokaryotes, there is a lot of horizontal gene transfer. What if some of the synthetic sequences get into other organisms and spread out?

0 comments

_yb2s2y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse