After discussing about the place where the data of life is stored (nucleic acids), and the way this data is read (The assembly lines of bio-tech), and before we will talk about what makes life so wonderful, I’ll explain why I think that living is all about information.Information is the core of biology.
One of the things that biological systems master is information saving and manipulating. As already said, many of the cell resources are dedicated to protecting, maintaining, and reading this data. The way biology invent new designs and functions, is by slowly moderating this data, in a way called evolution. I am not going to enter into it right now, but this it is a very important notion.
The living world invented an amazing set of innovations, which are much more advanced than humans have ever invented. The animal and plant world is still ahead of us in energy harvesting and manipulation, in building complex structures and materials and many other functions.
The meaning of this data.
All of this data is stored in tiny nucleus, and is transferred from generation to generation for billions of years. Anything else is extremely temporary, the materials that make life are degraded and gone very fast, but the data remains. This is the secret of life.
When we consider the chemical differences between organisms, we will found out that basically all the living world is build from virtually the same building blocks. Much of our membranes, proteins and other small materials is the same. The only thing that really differ one species from another is the information that lineate the manuscript of life.
Consequently, the key to understand and utilize the power of life to our advantage is to understand the information. Once we will understand the “genome” and how the information is stored and used; we will be the kings of all life. But this is not so easy...
Biological information is complex.
When scientists understood the importance of data processing in biology, a new field of research was born – bioinformatics. This is the science of understanding the data behind the chemistry of life. Now we collected a huge amount of data, and we have strong computers that allow us to dive into the enormous information of life, and the vision is mesmerizing. It quickly became clear that reading and understanding, even the simplest genome is very hard. The information is more than just words of DNA that translated to proteins. The biological data is encrypted in each aspect of life, starting with the way data is altered in the DNA itself, by chemically modifying the code of life, and ending in the way the proteins themselves are edited and changed after their were already translated.
How to read the data?
Although we are still very far away from reading the whole picture, we can already manipulate some of the genetic data to our advantages. We learn how to read the data stored in the DNA by a method called sequencing. We also learned how to control the expression of genes, and we can sometimes alter the amount of their expression. These tools are constantly increasing our knowledge of what genes are and how they work.
As genes are not working as single units but as a network of genes, small machines that work together, a new kind of science was invented called system biology. This research field is trying to understand the system as a whole, and already gave new insight of how the bigger picture of life information looks.
How can we use this data?
Well, as we understanding the information and the biological system more and more, we can use out knowledge to understand how living creatures use this knowledge to alter themselves and the environment, and then use this data to invent new technologies.
This understanding opened new grounds to medical, industrial and agricultural technologies already, and it is developing rapidly.
So if you want to deeply understand biotechnology, you must recognize the importance of the biological data, and how it is work, before trying to understand how to use it as a technology.
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