Researchers at the J Craig Venter Institute recently unveiled their first self-replicating synthetic bacteria (M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0) whose DNA was ‘programmed’ base pair by base pair. To verify that they had synthesized a new organism and not assembled the DNA from another natural bacteria, scientists encoded a series of ‘watermarks’ into the genes of M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. There are four of these hidden messages: an explanation of the coding system used, a URL address for those who crack the code to go visit, a list of 46 authors and contributors, and a series of famous quotes. The presence of these watermarks verifies that M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 truly is synthetic and demonstrates the precision and power of JCVI’s new techniques in synthetic biology.
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It turns out that the secret message in the watermark is partly in HTML. It’s amazing to think that they actually put HTML into the DNA of a living organism. They claim the code also supports Perl and Java, but that’s not present in this organism.
It turns out that the secret message in the watermark is partly in HTML. It’s amazing to think that they actually put HTML into the DNA of a living organism. They claim the code also supports Perl and Java, but that’s not present in this organism.
For more details, see my explanation at http://www.arcfn.com/2010/05/decoding-secret-dna-code-in-venters.html