Post #2895468

2026-05-13 16:42 UTC

I'm a data analyst at a medical nonprofit, primarily doing analyses on germline variants for rare forms of cancer. I'm new to this kind of work, but had a decent educational background in biology. Something I've learned is that genetics are complicated as hell. A single gene can produce multiple different proteins, and proteins change over time due to somatic variation. Only 1% of the genome are protein coding, called exomes. Exomes can be affected by variations to start and stop codons, non coding regions, and untranslated regions. There are entire fields dedicated to studying genome-wide, exomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phenomics, and probably several others that I don't know about. The amount of data involved with these fields is in the tebibytes region. Have you ever seen a "small" 3GiB csv? I have. The filtered and cleaned data frames created by genetics are over 100 columns wide and have nearly 5 million entries. There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes. There's a whole field of computer science dedicated to biological computing, using DNA as a storage medium. There are companies dedicated to simply classifying genes. DNA is cool as hell.

Replies (5)

@MrEff@lemmy.world 2026-05-13 17:31

If you really want to blow your mind, look into the theoretical alternatives to DNA. we are all taught about RNA and how it is a precursor to DNA, but what if it went another way? Look up PNA, PNA-O, or even GNA. If life existed on other worlds, there is a decent chance it follows an xNA structure, but not necessarily DNA.

Open ##2895526
@pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 2026-05-13 16:48

> There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes. My dude, not a fun thing to think about who might have control over that. Is it a musk, zuck, cook or epstein?

Open ##2895527
@ptu@sopuli.xyz 2026-05-13 20:47

Interesting, could you enlighten what types if data is in those 100 columns? I’m aware of ATGC and thought it would be just one column, but maybe the rest are some that indicate intensity or activity. Or what sequence they are part of.

Open ##2895528
@foofiepie@lemmy.world 2026-05-13 23:03

I have no context/knowledge on topic. Are you saying DNA has that much data that can be extracted from it? If so, that’s nuts.

Open ##2895529
@homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2026-05-13 17:27

That’s too much science. We, as a people, need less sci- wait, no. No, no. Uh - We need bett-er? Science? Hmm. Look just make it an animated cartoon with fun music for now and we’ll circle back.

Open ##2895530