Genetic Modding of Pop?

[jimbob]

Post 600!!!

Anyway. As a biologist, I've gotta agree with you on this one. It will be relatively easy to modify a genome soon - what's adding a little enzyme here, a little metabolic pathway there, when you can just drop in the genes from other organisms that do live in those environments anyway? It should be a lot easier to just genetically modify your population than to change the entire atmosphere of a planet!!

The best addition (to SEv) would be to let the player choose multiple atmospheres in which their population can function, but then have genetic projects that can let you add more atmosphere types to their genome as the game progresses. As I see it you could do genetic swapping where the population gets to breath a new atmosphere, or genetic switching where they add more and more pathways to their genome (that is, can breath multiple atmospheres).

But as for doing it in SEiv, I think we're out of luck

cheers,
jimbobo

[ June 24, 2003, 00:14: Message edited by: jimbob ]

[Fyron]

Originally posted by mottlee:
No adding more that one dose nothing converts from the time of the first built

Are you certain it is the first one built, and not the fastest one? Have you tested this extensively?

[Spoo]

But there isn't an "oxygene-breathing gene". You would need to completely redesign an organism to make it survive in a different atmosphere. I would imagine it would be just as easy to design a completely new species for every specific task, and live Flintstones-style.

[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.