ABSTRACT
Industry is gaining control over the technology's future.
ABSTRACT
The miniaturization of semiconductor transistors has driven the growth in computer performance for more than 50 years. As miniaturization approaches its limits, bringing an end to Moore's law, performance gains will need to come from software, algorithms, and hardware. We refer to these technologies as the "Top" of the computing stack to distinguish them from the traditional technologies at the "Bottom": semiconductor physics and silicon-fabrication technology. In the post-Moore era, the Top will provide substantial performance gains, but these gains will be opportunistic, uneven, and sporadic, and they will suffer from the law of diminishing returns. Big system components offer a promising context for tackling the challenges of working at the Top.
ABSTRACT
Gene synthesis enables creation and modification of genetic sequences at an unprecedented pace, offering enormous potential for new biological functionality but also increasing the need for biosurveillance. In this paper, we introduce a bioinformatics technique for determining whether a gene is natural or synthetic based solely on nucleotide sequence. This technique, grounded in codon theory and machine learning, can correctly classify genes with 97.7% accuracy on a novel data set. We then classify â¼19,000 unique genes from the Addgene non-profit plasmid repository to investigate whether natural and synthetic genes have differential use in heterologous expression. Phylogenetic analysis of distance between source and expression organisms reveals that researchers are using synthesis to source genes from more genetically-distant organisms, particularly for longer genes. We provide empirical evidence that gene synthesis is leading biologists to sample more broadly across the diversity of life, and we provide a foundational tool for the biosurveillance community.
