Re: Poetry in extremeophile bacteria | and any DIYbio scene in HK?

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Ethan <argentumxy@gmail.com> wrote:
> This looks pretty interesting. I wonder how the poetry will be encoded
> in DNA sequence. Practically, if all current knowledge is wiped out
> somehow, including the cypher used to encode the poetry, I find it
> hard to believe that people will later come across the code and think
> to try converting it into readable language. Then again, I imagine the
> intent is far less practical and more metaphysical.

I like the idea that rumours of this art project will survive through
the ages, maybe in some dusty archive, until a curious future person
stumbles across these rumours and decides to go hunt for the progeny
of this modified bug. Terribly poetic.

More on the practical side, I imagine you'd want to encode the poem in
some region of DNA that is not highly conserved since major
modifications in this area would very likely be deleterious to the
point of being lethal. Of course, a region of DNA that is not under
much selective pressure to be conserved would be expected to
accumulate mutations at a higher rate, which means the poem would be
slowly decaying until it's lost in noise. This in turn makes me wonder
whether D. radiodurans has many such regions, and whether those are
large enough to accomodate a poem.

Googling/Bioinformatics challenge anyone? The complete sequence is
available from GenBank
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/?term=Deinococcus%20radiodurans) -
go! :)

Alternatively, you could come up with a code that is spread out over
the entire genome without introducing any major/deleterious
modifications, for example by only modifying the codons' wobble
position or something along those lines - this, in turn, may go in the
direction of what DARPA kickstarted a while back - enforcement of IP
in GMOs, watermarking and such. Which is something we should
definitely watch closely.

There you go - not just metaphysics, but a wonderful starting point
for a DIYBio adventure, even just an in silico one.

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