Credit: SPL
It's a perfect night to discover the secrets of the universe. The seductive, cosmic sounds of Pink Floyd play into my earphones softening the sterile white cubicles that define the Integrative Biology lab.
I'm in my cubicle plugging away at the DNA sequence of Trichoplax. Hot off the machines of the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in California, it's been gushed through to our lab's supercomputer so we can join in on the gold rush, fossicking for genetic gems through the 86 million letters of code.
I couldn't wait till morning. I would have first dibs and savour the experience. The stream of code flicking across my screen looks just like the opening credits of GATTACA, line after line of code – 86 million permutations of the letters A, T, C, G, an endless, monotonous string. Not monotonous. The awe was still strong in me. My mum had told me of the awe she felt the first time she'd read a stretch of DNA. "You can't imagine - it was like glimpsing into some ancient scroll of life." I can imagine Ma...
Mum had worked on a single gene of the fruit fly. She used to joke that she'd done a little bit of engineering on me on the side—a little extra gene for flight, one for night vision.
Seeing the X-men seemed strangely familiar. Mum had been a pretty good genetic engineer, wielding fine lances under microscopes to inject fly eggs with new genes. But these days, she was totally left behind. All the action was in silico. Children of the computer generation playing with DNA code, as easily as ... an X-box game? More easily, maybe.
The secrets of the universe yielded to thems who could crack codes. "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon..." Different labs but we still liked the same music — Mum used to love listening to Pink Floyd late nights in the lab.
OK Trichoplax, what do we have here. I start with some standard homology searches. What genes would Trichoplax share with other critters?
Of course, people had been doing gene homology searches since Mum's day and before. That was the crack in the door. Lots of cool stuff emerged that really threw people. Like a gene that masterminded the creation of a fly's eye turned out to be the same gene that did the job in a mouse. Some nifty engineer took the mouse gene and stuck it in the fly - and it worked. It worked anywhere you switched it on, the fly's leg for instance. So you have flies that not only tasted with their feet; they saw with them!
