Genetic Modding of Pop?

[Dralasite]

Genetic modification would be a cool idea for SEV. Not sure what it would do to some of the empire traits (env. resistance, strength, etc.) But thats thinking of SEV in terms of SEIV.

As an aside, I read it (correctly) as "pop", but I was thinking soda. Must be the liter I was pouring down my throat while browsing the forums. I thought to myself... yeah, that stuff tastes ok but it could use some tinkering

[jimbob]

Spoo: Well, yes, it would be nearly impossible now. And I'll give you the point that from an energetic perspective, oxygen is the best of the common gases as a terminal electron acceptor (that is, you get more respiratory energy if you use oxygen as the end of the road, rather than say nitrate or sulfate). However, there is great commonality in metabolism between most earth bound organisms... even those that don't utilize oxygen. And we're talking about more than one gene, but less than 50.

That said, really an organism needs only two things: (1) a mechanism of transporting the terminal electron acceptor (ie oxygen is the usual e- acceptor on earth) from the lungs to the tissue. So you just need to "convince" the circulatory system to carry the new electron acceptor - that is you need to swap out haemoglobin for another carrier agent, or produce mutants of haemoglobin that will efficiently carry another e- acceptor (ie nitrate).

Then the organism needs an (2) electron transport chain (where all the energy is recovered from the metabolism of the sugar source(s) used by the organism). Nearly all earth bound organisms use the same electron transport chain with about 7 protein complexes in it. Some organisms have a few minor modifications along the way (swap out one of the proteins for another, anaerobic bacteria have fewer complexes because they don't pass electrons to oxygen, or in the case of totally anaerobic bact. they may not even use an electron transport chain at all, but that's another story altogether ). Basically it's the same set of protein complexes with a few modified proteins here or there for variant terminal e- acceptors.

So basically, I think it's viable to say that a race could start mixing and matching metabolic pathways. It has to be harder than making a missile with a million mile range, but infinitely easier than colapsing a star into a black hole.

Edit: As an aside, to be realistic, oxygen races should have more energy than other races on the basis that oxygen is a better terminal e- acceptor than any other atmosphere type in this game. In fact, carbon dioxide is so reduced that it should not be usable as an e- acceptor at all. On the other hand, our planet's atmosphere would be more resonably described as a nitrogen atmosphere, not oxygen

[ June 24, 2003, 18:30: Message edited by: jimbob ]

[clark]

Well, quite the science lesson we all got! Thanks.

Perhaps SEV could handle this by removing the "cultural traits" section from a race, and allow it to be manipulated in the game.

So instead of us reducing the race's physical attributes in the begining (or intel, or farm appt), we would make changes to the population by researching, trading, conquering, etc.

Perhaps tie it in with the colony types- i.e., your people can't live on a gas giant (without a dome, even if it has your atmosphere, whatever) unless they have the appropriate gene mods...

just a thought... well, a couple of em, but you get the idea.