Website review: Cre-Lox recombination - Wikipedia, ...
thoreaulylazy discovered this in Biotech
•1 reviews since Jun 29, 2007
biotech
•en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cre-Lox_recombination
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thoreaulylazy discovered 13 months ago- Site-specific recombinase (SSR) technology is amazing -- it's a fairly new topic in genetics that allows one to algorithmically modify DNA in living cells, which is something that comes naturally to retroviruses like HIV and certain enzymes like Cre ("Cyclic REcombinase"). The Cre-Lox recombination, discovered by Prof. Brian Sauer and patented by DuPont in the '80s, is a powerful tool in the biotechnology landscape, much like the unix tool `sed` in a landscape that only has `ls` and `cat` otherwise. It's amazing how this enzyme, Cre, can hone in on loxP sites in a DNA helix with the precision of a machine and delete the bounded subsequence - and it's just as amazing how new researchers have selectively mutated from it a strain called Ter designed to delete HIV-inserted subsequences from human DNA despite the absence of loxP site boundaries around the malignant subsequence. In many ways, biotech is entering an era where both it and computer science fall under discrete mathematics. With such algorithmic definitiveness now lording over the destiny of genetics, the same sort of magic which allowed computing to evolve from flickering bulbs on a vacuum tube system to full-fledged simulated universes should allow our simple `sed`-like tools of biotech to similarly evolve into something fantastical, limited by only our imagination. Rue the day our servant-Gods in the form of machines and enzymes no longer act at our behest.
