G. Welz's Original Posting to bionet.general and chromosome.bionet.genome
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 95 17:55:29 0000
From: Gary Welz
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Subject: Can a genome be analyzed like a computer program?
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I'm writing an article about the large scale structure of the genome.
Does anyone besides me think that an organism's genome can be regarded
as a computer program? I mean that its structure can be presented as a
flowchart with genes as objects connected by logical terms like "and"
and "or" and, of course, "while" loops?
One development that might support this point of view is the recent
demonstration (reported in last week's Science) that the eyeless gene
can be inserted into various parts of the chromosome of a fly and cause
it to have eyes grow on different parts of its body. Is eyeless a free
standing genetic object that can be plugged into any syntactically
correct sequence and function as though it belonged there naturally?
Gene Stanley and others at Boston U. and Harvard Medical School have
done statistical analyses of non-coding DNA sequences (published in
Physical Review Letters a few months ago) that suggest that there may be
linguistic structures, i.e. words within them. Are some of these
non-coding sequences the terms of the genetic programming language?
If this is interesting to you, or if you think its bogus, let me know.
Mr. Gary Welz
Dept. of Mathematics
John Jay College, CUNY
My first response came from Robert Robbins of the Dept. of Energy Genome Database Project.
Return to the body of the article.