Genetic Engineering simulation

Question

Does anybody have any good source of software/tutorial about Genetic Engineering Simulation? Maybe open source software about gene splicing / cloning simulation ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Excellent question!

Clearly genetic engineering can't be simulated at an analytic level - ie. modelling the mechanism involved - because some of the processes, such as protein folding, DNA transcription, etc., are too complex and haven't been modelled yet.

They are still working on a map of the human genome, and I'm sure they haven't gotten around to anything else because anything of reasonable complexity isn't that much less complex (in terms of number of genes) from a human. For example, you can save 2% in complexity, but then you have a chimp not a human.

However, there might be possible approaches based on empirical methods - i.e. "best guess" methods, or experimentation. Thus, you might look at recent work in machine learning or data mining for some possible approaches. There are a lot of data mining and machine learning methods out there, ranging from genetic algorithms, neural networks, decision trees, SVM, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

Answer 2

This might be up your alley:

Genetic Programming - Evolution of Mona Lisa by Roger Alsing.

Mona Lisa Source Code and binaries

Mona Lisa FAQ

All very interesting and impressive stuff.

Answer 3

This may not be exactly what you're after, but have you looked at Spore?

It's quite possible that there is no such thing as "serious" genetic engineering simulation software. I think it would be a very difficult concept to implement.