Evolution: bacterial origin + “plants invented version control”

27:08efficient way to do this process. >> Yeah. >> And they all >> sort of ended up centering on the same implementation. >> Yeah. They they reinvented the wheel >> like four or five times in evolution. You know, it's kind of interesting to think about because one one way you could one thing you could ask is like how is this even possible, right? How do you how do you do this kind of evolution? Well, the cyanobacteria genome gets in integrated. >> The the bacterial genome gets integrated into the plant genome. And then what you have is these things called tandem arrays, which is effectively when you replicate a gene, sometimes you get multiple copies of that gene. Okay? And that becomes something called a tandem array. Now, your main copy you don't

27:50want to mess with, >> right? >> Okay. It's kind of like in GitHub when you like push commits. You have a branch separately for yourself where you're doing all sorts of heinous crap. Don't push it to main, but you Yeah. You never push it to main unless you're really sure that it's working, right? >> And so this tandem array is basically that it's effectively like multiple GitHub branches. You're messing around here and your main is still going at it. But with all these copies, you can you can start doing some mutations. You can figure it out. And if something works, hey, let's keep it, you know, because evolution wants to keep it. >> Plants invented version control before GitHub. Okay, so this you heard it here first. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Plant-based version control is the true

28:32OG. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And we're just we're just repurposing it. >> Repurposing it. >> So now let's look into applications. What could this be used for? Well, um these alkaloids are very important in medicine, right? And what you can do for example if you want to make securine which is this particular compound that we're studying this is um you know in cancer this can be used against leukemia for leukemia therapy it can be used as uh kind of neuro protection type thing before what we used to have to do is grow this plant and get the compound out. You can imagine that's not scalable.

29:12>> No. and it's very expensive. >> Now, we know the gene that does it. >> Furthermore, the gene is a one-step process. >> So, we can just crisper this gene into yeast. >> Mhm. >> And then grow yeast. The the idea being is we know the the factory that produces the outcome we're looking for at this molecular level inside of plants, >> but because we understand the genes, the needed gene expression to replicate