Hi,
Does anybody have any good source of software/tutorial about Genetic Engineering Simulation? Maybe open source software about gene splicing / cloning simulation ?
Thanks
A:
This may not be exactly what you're after, but have you looked at Spore?
It's quite possible that there is no such thing as "serious" genetic engineering simulation software. I think it would be a very difficult concept to implement.
Carl Smotricz
2010-01-10 15:17:29
Actually, an ex-colleague of mine at Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, wrote a pretty complete bacterial genetic engineering simulator (chopping and splicing) on a Commodore PET way back in the early 1980s. I have no clue what happened to it, but I imagine you could do much better nowadays.
anon
2010-01-10 15:24:39
I stand corrected, then. Thank you!
Carl Smotricz
2010-01-10 15:28:03
A:
Excellent question!
Clearly genetic engineering can't be simulated at an analytic level - ie. modelling the mechanism involved - because some of the processes, such as protein folding, DNA transcription, etc. are too complex and haven't been modelled yet.
They are still working on a map of the human genonme, and I'm sure they haven't gotten around to anything else because anything of reasonable complexity isn't that much less complex (in terms of number of genes) from a human. For example, you can sav 2% in complexity, but then you have a chimp not a human.
However, there might be possible approaches based on empirical methods - i.e. "best guess" methods, or experimentation. Thus, you might look at recent work in machine learning or data mining for some possible approaches. There is a lot of data mining and machine learning methods out there, ranging from genetic algorithms, neural networks, decision trees, SVM, etc.
Larry Watanabe
2010-01-10 15:24:38
+1
A:
This might be up your alley:
Genetic Programming - Evolution of Mona Lisa by Roger Alsing.
Mona Lisa Source Code and binaries
All very interesting and impressive stuff.
daft
2010-01-10 15:29:26