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Using magnetic attraction and repulsion to simulate C-G-A-T, this tinker toy set lets children build incredible helical structures while subliminally learning the basics about DNA sequencing.
The Caduceus
http://images.googl...&btnG=Search+Images
"Well... When a Mummy Snake and A Daddy snake, who love eachother very much..." [Dub, Jan 20 2006]
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combine with snakes and ladders. |
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If you could tear your DNA into halves lengthwise, put a half in a container with lots of parts, shake, and pull out a duplicate - that would be cool. |
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Makes me want to walk into some public place and yell 'Watch out! I'm carrying billions of sequenced strands of deoxyribonucleic acid!" but I'm afraid the Homeland Security boys would be on me in a New York minute. |
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[+]Cool. The non-toddlers may get bored with it as a toy, not knowing what the phenotype is for the assembled genotype. |
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Give the idea to LeapFrog, and that gang could probably bake this along with sensors in the wedges & backbone to then plug it into a cartridge, and it could say "this will give you green eyes", or "this will make you allergic to peanuts", etc. |
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[po] Perhaps that's what the European Pharmacy symbol's all about - (The caduceus - a staff with the 2 snakes wrapped around it) - They look like double-helix snakes to me. |
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//If you could tear your DNA into halves lengthwise, put a half in a container with lots of parts, shake, and pull out a duplicate - that would be cool.
// |
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The replication of DNA is more complicated than this, it involves a protein complex walking along, making the copy one base at a time.
Actually its more complicated even than that, but anyway I think it would be so much more cool to have a machine that clipped onto the DNA, and could be pulled along, feeding in nucleotides and having them incorporated. |
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I suspect a big bucket of magnetic parts would end up as one big clump, anyway. |
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... actually the potential of this is much larger. Throw in a compatible set of 4 ribonucleotides, a ribosome tool, amino acids and a set of 30 or so tRNAs, and you could generate peptides. A fantastic tool for the budding geneticist. |
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Other extras, only owned by rich kids, geeks and genetic engineers: RNA polymerase, for translating DNA to mRNA; restriction enzymes, which recognise and split the DNA at a certain sequence; topoisomerases, which add or remove twists; and of course the big mother full replication factory. |
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