DNA seen through the Eyes of a Coder

The Source Code is here. This not a joke. We can wonder about the license though. Maybe we should ask the walking product of this source: Craig Venter (update: not quite true, it is mostly someone else). The source can be viewed via a wonderful set of perl scripts called ‘Ensembl’. The human genome is about 3 gigabases long, which boils down to 750 megabytes. Depressingly enough, this is only 3.6 (update: used to be 2.8, apparently Firefox decreased in size, huh.) Mozilla browsers.

DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called ‘the nucleus’. It is very doubtful that there is a source to this byte compilation - what you see is all you get.

Illustration of a DNA molecule.

Illustration of a DNA molecule.

The language of DNA is digital, but not binary. Where binary encoding has 0 and 1 to work with (2 - hence the ‘bi’nary), DNA has 4 positions, T, C, G and A.

Whereas a digital byte is mostly 8 binary digits, a DNA ‘byte’ (called a ‘codon’) has three digits. Because each digit can have 4 values instead of 2, a DNA codon has 64 possible values, compared to a binary byte which has 256.

A typical example of a DNA codon is ‘GCC’, which encodes the amino acid Alanine. A larger number of these amino acids combined are called a ‘polypeptide’ or ‘protein’, and these are chemically active in making a living being.

Source: 
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/amazing-dna/

See also: 
https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/codon-155/

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