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victor106 2 hours ago

For someone in Software what is a good way to learn the fundamentals of this?

vikramkr an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If you live near a community bio lab see if you can join up and take some classes to learn some basic lab techniques. And some sort of intro bio class via mooc/textbook/local college class whatever if you can but community lab is honestly a great place to start if you have one.

The main thing to keep in mind is that all the stuff that involves analogies between software and biology is almost universally a bullshit oversimplification that you can safely ignore. It's just that software is so profitable and there's so much vc money in it that there's a ton of pressure to be like "oh we can program biology like we program computers." We can't - we invented computers but didn't invent biology. Biology is the end result of 4 billion years of unchecked entropy - it's a chaos system, non deterministic in the wildest ways, impossibly complicated, and yet something we are getting astonishingly good at understanding and engineering.

Basically, all the biologists that started companies that were like "we can program biology like we can program computers" are bankrupt now.

On the other hand, the computer scientists that respected the nature of biology and pushed the limits of computing to develop Alphafold - giant models trained on the full complexity of biological data - finally created computer systems that could handle biological systems like protein folding at an extraordinary level of capability. They won a nobel.

ramon156 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Follow up question (Not OP), would alphafold more be used to experiment with an already-defined theory that you have, or could you also make some toy projects (e.g. how people make projects around trading engines).

I'm wondering if I could find a fun weekend project in alphafold just to see what it's like.

elric 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

TIL community biolabs are a thing ...

Are they really? Is this just limited to some very specific areas with an active biotech scene?

zulko 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Possibly not what you're asking for, but I wrote a generally-accessible intro to why it can be tricky to assemble many DNA fragments with "Golden Gate Assembly", a mainstream method which relies on short sequence overhangs. The Sidewinder method discussed in this thread aims to solve that "short overhang" problem.

https://zulko.github.io/bricks_and_scissors/posts/overhangs/