Cats and Dogs
- Thread starter Orleander
- Start date
in 100 years we will grow cat/dogs
if our technology does not follow its trend because of a global catastrophe then yes you could still make a lot of change over 100 years, but you probably won't get as much variation as the dog has gone through
if our technology does not follow its trend because of a global catastrophe then yes you could still make a lot of change over 100 years, but you probably won't get as much variation as the dog has gone through
it's just speculation
dogs have gone through more than 100 years of selective breeding. Speculation comes in to play when I judge how our current technology will speed things up
dogs have gone through more than 100 years of selective breeding. Speculation comes in to play when I judge how our current technology will speed things up
I am saying that big / small cats are possible, and with enough time even a mix of a dog and a cat will be possible
I don't think a cat and dog interbreeding is possible in even a million attempts, even if it did work the off-spring would be sterile. Chromosomes mis-matching is the reason for most interbreeding barriers. Just one number off in chromosome pairs usually leads to infertility (horse = 64, Ass = 62, Mule = 63 infertile), cats have 38 chromosomes (19 pairs), Dogs have 74 (36 pairs) the resulting "cog" would have 45 chromosome and likely be missing enough active genes for basic house keeping functions needed to just keep it's cells alive let alone grow a functional body.
Perhaps it would only be certain genes that would be sequenced not half cat and half dog type of gene splicing.
Well sure with enough gene splicing you could make a "cog", then again with enough gene splicing you could make a dragon, welcome to the realm of synthetic biology, estimated time line until you can own your own cog or dragon, somewhere around 2100.
It could be sooner than that if science keeps accelerating like it is today. I'd say within 50 years it will be done. IMHO
Perhaps, if the singularity hits by 2050 I would say it could happen. We would need a lot of quantum computers to crunch all the protein design and protenomic interactions and then there is the shear number of genes needed to be modified or complete redesigned, it would be like designing a Boing 787 that can grow its self.
Combining nano technologies with quantum computers could result in just that happening.
nanotech is just a edgy word, nanorobots and bioroids are the same things its just one is made out of inorganic parts and the other is made out of biological molecules, bioroids can be designed now and build from genetic "lego sets" nanorobots though are likely still decades away, unless your talking about molecular assembly lines, we might be able to do that soon but it would be like a computer chips that spits out chemicals, a molecular assembly line could be used to rapidly write (syntheses) DNA though. Sophisticated Bioroids with novel gene or mulicellular designs will require quantum computers to designed because of the shear number crunching need to for predicting protein structure and interactions.
That is what I was referring to.
Why would you do that?
well present DNA syntheses is slow and limited to writing a few hundred basepairs , of which we need to stitch them together to make longer strains, for example the human genome has 3 billion base pairs, even if we cheated by stitching the homologous regions and cutting out the structural DNA (~80% of the genome) its still a titanic task, even now the systhises of a sythetic bacteria (of 3 million base pairs) is consider a triumph.
Here a article on the improvements on DNA synthesizers: http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/dna-synthesis-costs-and-projections.html
(Google it and read the cached version for free)
The link doesn't work.
as implied:
1. Open google
2. Copy and paste the link into google search bar
3. There should be one result, don't press it, instead press "cached" instead.
Here another "Microarray-based approach could achieve 20,000 bases per dollar", do the same thing.
I wouldn't. And I wouldn't understand why others would. I was just wondering.
I know they now have a cat with itty bitty short legs. Keeps the cat from jumping on the counters, furniture, etc. Seems mean to me, but then they did the same to dogs to go down burrows. :shrug:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
It's an accident of evolution that dogs have genes in which variances can make an enormous difference in physical appearance, including size. So when we breed them for appearance, all we're doing is sorting those genes out and selecting for the ones we want. Cats don't have anything like that. We'd have to sit around and wait for mutations to occur.
People love tiny cats. If it were possible to breed them down to toy size, you can be sure it would have been done by now.
