Developmental biology for geeks.

Today, as promised, I will begin a series of articles on developmental biology. The style of presentation is deliberately technocratic, since it is precisely informational analogies that make it possible to understand in the best way how life works.

Developmental biology is a science that answers the question of how exactly, for example, an adult organism is taken from a cell? In principle, the regulation of the life of a single cell can be considered as the basis of developmental biology. Let's start with it.


So everyone knows that there is DNA, RNA and proteins in the cell.
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How does it happen that a cell lives and works?

To begin with, let's try to find analogies from the world of information systems, what a cell is and the physical laws that surround it. So, the cell itself is an object, that is, simply information, some code . And physical laws are the operating system . It sets the properties of the surrounding world, which no program can change from within the operating system. They are for it a given and immutable law.
Moreover, the operating system acts as a kind of superprocess, otherwise, a macro daemon , which itself can somehow interact with the information on the hard drive. It is stored in RAM, which is a virtual “computing space”.
Of course, there is no RAM in the cell, but the analogy is convenient.
Together, this is a kind of computer life.

Let's go further.

What is DNA?

Well, everyone knows that this is a code. And in our terms, this is part of the cell code. Suppose a whole cell occupies 100 mb on our virtual disk, and DNA means approximately 1 mb. Of course conditionally.

In addition to the DNA codes, what information is still encoded in the physical structure of the cell? Well, of course, proteins and other molecules. They occupy the rest of the cell code.

This is what we described the “hard drive” of our life.

Now let's go to the RAM.

You know, life is very entertaining and at the same time simple thing, just like a computer, it is simply dead without a “RAM”. It seems like everything is the same, the body lies on the table, there is the same set of substances, there are both proteins and DNA and everything else, but there is no life.

How so?

But:

The fact is that a living organism is always “supplied” already included, with a working RAM (already infested with demons) and a working hard drive with all the recorded information. (The question is, what was the first chicken or egg - not to me;)

Our computer is sharpened by the parallel work of thousands and millions of processes. Each process - “demon” is a very simple program that, firstly, is tied to a specific place on the hard drive, from where a macrodemon is started, secondly, it can do something with another place on the hard drive, and maybe even with its own.

Understand what a demon? Well this is protein molecules. They scurry about in and out of the cell and constantly change something, modify, read the information and write down the updated one.

It must be said that we omit RNA in our narrative, since in principle it is not important to us and will focus on DNA and proteins.

And now, armed with all this knowledge, we return to DNA.

So, DNA is the repository of all the raw source codes of the operating system's operating daemons.

On the DNA region, demons continuously work - compilers that create new images of demons in RAM and simultaneously write them to free places on the hard drive. The entire area of ​​the hard drive except DNA is an extremely dynamic substance. Erasing and recording happens all the time, not for nothing is it a powerful parallel computer. Only the DNA region remains stable, in fact being the organizing center of the entire system.

So, every living organism functions as a powerful parallel computer.

A living cell along with all the molecules is the image on the hard drive, the outer side of life. Each molecule has its own place on it, from where it can be loaded into RAM. Life itself is the functioning of the daemon programs that are launched into the operating memory by the macrodemon of the operating system (that is, by physical laws) and continuously modify the information on the hard drive, that is, the place from which other demons or themselves start.

DNA is the organizing principle, the repository of the inviolable source codes of demons, the guarantor of the fact that the system will not go into spacing.

- PS I hope all this is interesting to you. I'll add one more thing for a snack. What do you think is the birth of life?

So, in my terms, this is when a macrodemon in RAM could read random information on the hard drive in such a way that a demon was formed that managed to write down its copy there. Further reproduction of demons and the emergence of their different variants, as well as the emergence of a stabilizer - DNA was already a matter of technology.

PSS Fundamentally, the allocation of the hard drive and RAM is not very good, since life is in fact both at the same time. But the understanding of such a double concept is much simpler, so do not throw rags :) I think this is the most difficult article from the cycle, it will be easier later :)

UPD The public took it in hostility and for the most part did not bother to figure it out, so there will be no continuation. I'm not going to prove anything to anyone, but from stupid aggressive attacks - dismiss.