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Is it possible to recreate a wheat plant from just its genome?


No. You need a wheat cell as well. Then you might be in business.

And, no, it is not possible (today) to rebuild a multi gigabase hexaploid genome. The best that's been done so far is mycoplasma (500kb genome, which is many orders of magnitude smaller).

Also, the "genome sequence" presented here is not really complete. Thus far only the simplest organisms have had their genomes synthesized from a digital template and resulted in a viable cell. We rarely can produce a "complete" genome for anything other than bacteria and viruses. And for those, the diversity in the population makes the idea of establishing a single genome sequence somewhat limiting.


Today? No. Likely the so-called "junk DNA" was skipped over and we are still learning what the impact of environment and hormones is on gene expression.

What we can do today is to manipulate DNA and re-inject into an egg. Although not nothing, this is not "just its genome."

In 100 years? Probably.


A decent analogy might be:

is it possible to recreate a running program from just it's source?

(lacking a compiler, development and production environments, and perhaps user inputs)

so my feeling is, not really, to an approximation


Sure it's possible. (I've recreated programs from source despite lacking the compiler, etc., originally used on it. The trick is to adapt something else to the task.) The source contains instructions on how it works, and those instructions can be used elsewhere.




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