Category: Uncategorized

SO ENDS this first of two weekends contemplating horizontal gene transfer. The world of microbes is so different from the eukaryotic world, and this is strongly highlighted by the free flow of genes between these creatures, and as we will see next weekend, between microbes and eukaryotes. Horizontal gene transfer in microbes finds its equivalent in eukaryotic sex, serving to fresh the genome from bad mutations and to be a fountain of genetic innovation. View in LinkedIn

ROBOT-HUMAN SCIENCE TEAMS. "Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories. Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult and irksome for human scientists, but easy for Robot Scientists." https://lnkd.in/dMfcK8Q View in LinkedIn

GENE INTAKE. "However, the demonstration that at least in some bacteria the ingested DNA is protected against degradation, thus preventing its use as a nucleotide source and conversely facilitating HGT, implies that, at least in part, natural competence evolved as a gene transfer mechanism." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

OUTPERFORMED. "We built and tested a detailed logical model (involving genes, proteins and metabolites) of the aromatic amino acid synthesis pathway. In biological experiments that automatically reconstruct parts of this model, we show that an intelligent experiment selection strategy is competitive with human performance and significantly outperforms, with a cost decrease of 3-fold and 100-fold (respectively), both cheapest and random-experiment selection." https://lnkd.in/d_c-WZa View in LinkedIn

DNA PUMPS. "Diverse bacteria and archaea are competent for natural transformation that is mediated by dedicated DNA intake pumps. These pumps can be legitimately considered devices for utilization of environmental DNA as a source of nucleotides (simply put, food), with HGT being a fringe benefit." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

EUREQUA. "What took Newton years to calculate, Eureqa returned in a few hours on a decent desktop computer." https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

COMPLEMENTARY RESOURCE. "The competitive success of the Data Science Machine suggests it has a role alongside data scientists. We view the Data Science Machine as a natural complement to human intelligence." https://lnkd.in/dG_krDG View in LinkedIn

HOURS VS MONTHS. "But the win-loss record was not the most impressive takeaway from the competitions. While teams of humans sweat their predictive algorithms for months leading up to competition, the Data Science Machine took somewhere between two and 12 hours to produce each of its entries." https://lnkd.in/dG_krDG View in LinkedIn

HIGH SCORES VS HUMANS. "In 2 of the 3 competitions we beat a majority of competitors, and in the third, we achieved 94 percent of the best competitor’s score. In the best case, with an ongoing competition, we beat 85.6 percent of the teams and achieved 95.7 percent of the top submissions score." (MIT's Data Science Machine). https://lnkd.in/dG_krDG View in LinkedIn

VERACITY TESTS. "Meant to replace human intuition eventually when it comes to the search for buried patterns, the Data Science Machine as it is called, managed to outperform human teams in three data science competitions." https://lnkd.in/dpR5gRZ View in LinkedIn