Coming from a bioinformatics background this is really, really surprising to me. I knew there was always a chance of individual cells diverging from the shared genome but we always considered that a hallmark of cancerous, abnormal growth.
Thinking that you could have a trillion unique variations of the genome significantly ups the computational complexity of simulating an organism by a frightful order of magnitude. We are so much further from understanding biological systems than we ever thought.
That's been the main lesson from the modern era of sequencing, genomics, and bioinformatics - we haven't learned nearly as much as we have unlearned.
Thinking that you could have a trillion unique variations of the genome significantly ups the computational complexity of simulating an organism by a frightful order of magnitude. We are so much further from understanding biological systems than we ever thought.
That's been the main lesson from the modern era of sequencing, genomics, and bioinformatics - we haven't learned nearly as much as we have unlearned.