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AUGMENTATION. "Improving perceptual capabilities, biohybrid systems, exoskeletons, and metabolic enhancement can be considered for human performance augmentation. Medical implants for sensory replacement, including multiple sensory modalities for visually and hearing impaired persons, and direct brain-machine interfaces are real possibilities." https://lnkd.in/d8zQAx9 View in LinkedIn

THE PREAMBLE IS OVER. We have looked at prions, mobile genetic elements, viruses, and more. And then we looked at computer code viruses, artificial life forms, and more. And then we looked at the brain-machine interface. And now we are at the edge of machine intelligence and the marriage of man, technology and machine. The Trojan Horse has arrived. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge advised, "suspend your disbelief", and invite it in with an open mind. The future is about to arrive. View in LinkedIn

NEW FIELD. “Virus metagenomics is a young research direction but can already boast several stories of conspicuous success in the discovery of novel groups of (putative) viruses with unexpected features.” https://lnkd.in/dyavu7e View in LinkedIn

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY from a biological perspective have been the subject of extensive postings on this blog. The only way, in my opinion, to get a handle on both interesting and third rail subjects, is to examine the biological record, and try to understand it in the context of nature first. We tiptoe towards the issue of immortality. View in LinkedIn

MOVING TARGET. “Viruses possess signature genes, such as those encoding capsid protein, that provide for assignment of novel genomes to a particular family of viruses even in the absence of close relatives. The flip side of the coin is that viruses typically evolve much faster than cellular life forms so that finding homologs of virus genes is often challenging.” https://lnkd.in/dyavu7e View in LinkedIn

IP CONTEST. “The CRISPR–Cas9 system is at the centre of a patent row.“ https://lnkd.in/dvzwegh View in LinkedIn

THE VIRAL EXCEPTION. “The difficulties of metagenomic genome discovery are alleviated to a considerable extent when it comes to discovery of new virus genomes. Viral genomes are relatively small, for many important and abundant virus families, only several kilobases (kb) long, so that assembly of complete viral genome is often feasible.” https://lnkd.in/dyavu7e View in LinkedIn

CHALLENGES. “Sequences with high similarity to those from known organisms are readily assignable but those from truly novel genomes can be difficult to place. A further difficulty for metagenomic discovery is the correct assembly of long contigs.” https://lnkd.in/dyavu7e View in LinkedIn

THE PROBLEM. “Metagenomes, at least in principle, are unbiased representations of the environs from which they originate (apart from possible sequencing biases). Herein, also lies the intrinsic weakness of metagenomics: technically, it is never known which organism a given sequence comes from.” https://lnkd.in/dyavu7e View in LinkedIn

CULTURE REQUIREMENT. “Metagenomes are not constrained by the inherent requirement of traditional sequence databases that for genome sequencing, an organism has to be clearly identified and, at least in the case of microbes, grown in the laboratory.” https://lnkd.in/dyavu7e View in LinkedIn