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If you knew what DNA was and had seen a protein you could easily figure out start/stop codons. If you had only seen something similar it would be harder. If you had nothing similar, I don't know.

Coding DNA and non-coding DNA looks very different. Proteins are full of short repetitive sequences that form structural elements like alpha helixes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_helix

Once you've identified roughly where the protein-coding genes are it would be trivial to identify 3'/5' as being common to all those regions. You could pretty easily imagine a much more complicated system with different transcription mechanisms and codon categories, but earth genomes are super simple in that respect. Once you have those you just have the (incredibly complex) problem of creating a polymerase and bam, you'll be able to print every single gene in the body.

Without the right balance of promoters/factors/polymerase you probably won't get anything close to a human cell, but you'd be able to at least work closer to what the natural balance should be, and once you get closer to building a correct ribosome etc the cell would start to self-correct.



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