🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <j9gtv9.tg.ln@linuxsys.ii01.org>,
Robin Faichney  <robin@ii01.org> wrote:
>
>Don't know about "concrete work", but a serious theoretical issue is
>this: genes are not DNA sequences, but are encoded in such sequences.
>The decoding mechanism is the cellular machinery that interacts with
>the DNA.  Anyone who doubts that needs to read Darwin's Dangerous Idea
>by Dan Dennett.  And it's the gene, actually an abstraction, that carries
>the information.

Actually, the concept of gene itself is a bit tough to pin down.  Most
molecular biologists tend to just define the gene as the protein-coding
region, although regulatory regions -- which can be just as complicated
as the gene -- tend to get called "genes" by geneticists, who w/o the
sequence usually can't tell if their loci are in protein coding regions
or not.

I'm also not sure what you mean by abstraction: the amino acid sequence is
very strongly tied to the genomic sequence; heck, in prokaryotes, where you
don't have to worry about differential splicing and mRNA processing,
it's absolutely tied to the genomic sequence.

I wouldn't recommend Dennett for this basic stuff, if only because it's
apt to be a simplification.  We know an awful lot about genes, proteins,
and gene regulation; any recent molecular biology textbook would be a good
source.

--titus