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by shadowphex
2970 days ago
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It will be different, but concurrency, mutability, structured programming, and scope are very relevant. Concurrency: Not all genes are run at all times. Gene regulation can look a lot like code. Ex: if(curr_temp > DANGER_TEMP){temperature_defense_gene.activate()}. Mutability & Scope: Cells that have the same genome can act very differently (all of your cells have ~the same DNA, but act very differently) and some cells in your body can change roles. Structured Programming: Biological pathways use a lot of control flows. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_pathway |
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There's a ton of leakage and noise at most stages in biological pathways. Biology actually spends enormous amounts of effort to reduce the noise and leakage, but it's really hard to eliminate entirely.
Lets take the danger temp gene you use as an example. In bacteria that's mostly true, but even there what if we're low on nutrients? Or low on a particular nutrient? Or what if we start producing too much protein which is aggregating because the concentration is too high? Each cell is balancing all these concerns simultaneously, so even very simple biological circuits work/don't work in unexpected ways. What the OP is suggesting is that you're always concurrent with a huge number of different things going on that are far less isolated from your "process" than is traditionally the case in CS.
I agree that concurrency, mutability, scope, all that is relevant, but I think the OP's point that we don't have the theory on how those will apply in a biological context is correct.
Edit: for those interested, some papers on biological noise and the efforts cells use to reduce it:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.00820.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006352/ https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765(12)0...