[thedoc (OP)]

Staffan Lincoln asked the Naked Scientists:
   I'm interested in genetic engineering. I was delighted to find this video that explains how some people at MIT are making software for compiling computer software into DNA. I thought it might be interesting to the Naked Genetics Podcast crew. I'd love to hear more about the topic on the show.

What do you think?

[evan_au]

DNA is too long (and too boring) for a human to get their brain around, so you need computers.
- I understand that in the days before the Human Genome Project developed highly automated tools, it was possible for a Phd candidate to spend many years decoding 1 gene in 1 species, 1 base-pair at a time.
- These days, there are laboratories full of high-throughput gene-sequencing machines spitting out DNA sequences at a rate of Gigabits per second. You can't understand this without a computer
- I was talking to a Phd candidate who sent a biological sample for DNA sequencing, and received back a hard disk with almost 300 Gigabytes of raw DNA reads. He then had to stitch it together into a genome with computer tools, and analyze it with other software tools.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics