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.delgene in Real Life

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Peksa:
DB DNA is somewhat based on what real organisms can do and the things real organsims can do never cease to suprise me, so I'm wondering if there's match for .delgene in real biology? And is there some mechanism that could be described as .addgene?

bacillus:
A virus in DB is kind of what .addgene would look like. I think real-life viruses break down a cell's DNA and use the snippets to replicate their own; kind of like harvesting amino acids by using .delgene, then rebuilding them into a virus by using .mkvirus.

EricL:
As far as I know, biological genomes don't self edit themsleves but as Bacillus points out, viruses will insert themselves in a host cell's DNA and hijack it's machinery to do it's bidding.  And of course mutations can disable or copy whole genes or even larger multi gene sequences.  This is how most if not all genes came to be I.e. first they were a duplicate copy of another gene created via a copy mutation and then selection modified them over time to do something else.

Numsgil:
My understanding is that a cell really has no machinery to repair itself after virus insertion (the only real reason to have a .delgene), and the usual strategy is suicide if it gets that far.  Which is why the genome is so highly protected in most cells.

shvarz:
Bacteria have ways to specifically delete unwanted genes. They have methylases that "label" their own DNA with methyl groups. And they have restrictases that will destroy any DNA that does not have these "labels".

We have mechanisms that edit our genomic DNA in a very precise and specific way. This is used in immune system, where random fragments of DNA are snipped out to create a diverse set of new genes. Here's an example:
Say your genome is ABCabcdefg12345. In immune cells this mechanism would cut out a single capital letter, single lower-case letter and a single number and put them together. Thus different cells will have different final genes:
Aa2
Cf5
Be5
Ag1
etc.
These genes code for antibodies and therefore each cell has a different antibody gene, which can recognize a different pathogen.

Most viruses that we encounter don't destroy our DNA and they don't add to our DNA. They replicate as separate fragments of DNA or RNA. Only some viruses integrate their genome into ours. Most famous of those are retroviruses and our genomes are full of them. But majority of viruses don't do that.

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