Art of DNA Graffitti: Coding Bacteria With Secret Messages
You might think an inner thigh tattoo is a fairly intimate piece of writing, but scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (led by the obviously modest Dr J. Craig Venter) authored a message far more personally placed than that. Famous for creating the first piece of synthetic bacteria DNA, we've since learned that they've autographed it.
In the most amazing piece of graffiti since Neil Armstrong scratched "Neil Was Here" in the moon (and if he didn't, he should have), the researchers encoded the name of researchers involved in the project into the very genetic coding of the organism itself. The translation between DNA and our alphabet is based on the system whereby various amino acids are represented by letters.
This isn't just a chromosomal easter egg though - this has serious implications. The ability to encode secret messages into genetic strands without compromising their ability to function has huge potential in the internet's favorite subject: copyright. With ever increasing advances in medical research (and escalating costs and profits in the field) you can expect to see identifying marks in your favorite genetic sequences.
This raises a truly inspiring number of questions. Laying claim to pesticide-resistant crops may be fair enough, but it's only a matter of time before commercially adjusting the human code becomes feasible. Just how much control will recipients of gene therapy have of their own cellular instructions? Will you be sued for piracy if you have a child? Will cancer render you ineligible for technical support because your code was patched, albeit by a malignant mutation? And if the RIAA think enforcing MP3 ownership is hard, how on Earth will people check DNA?
These questions aren't as dystopian as you might think. This isn't the first time a message for those who can read it has been hidden in the very blueprints of an organism (and no, we're not talking about that star trek episode here). In 2003 a team of German geneticists encrypted a poem that was in latin, as if that wasn't restricting it to a small enough minority already, placing it in the genome of a plant. The technology has advanced considerably since then, writing messages as part of a whole new organism rather than jamming it into a co-operative species, but in the process we've moved from poetry to proprietary rights. We'll have to watch out for how far that continues.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
Very interesting, encoding information in DNA,
BUT ----
What if the DNA in which something is stored, like a piece of poetry, the Bill of Rights, the Drake Equation, or - ironically, the 1st paragraph of Genesis, gets corrupted ?
Just like any storage medium, the pure, original information content is LOST !! a few Gamma rays or stray UV radiation, then a mutation that affects other parts of the strand, then it's gone.
DNA as a storage medium - Novel, but not error - proof.
Posted by: EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville | May 30, 2009 at 03:53 PM
Perhaps random mutation could change it so that an entirely new poem is formed?
Perhaps, that is where poetry came from?
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