Found in translation
May 6, 2011 in OFFBEAT by Suzanne Elvidge
Back in 2003, a team of scientists translated the song It’s a Small World into DNA fragments and integrated it into the genome of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. Canadian poet Christian Bök has now gone one better and encoded a poem into a bacteria and programmed it to make its own poetic response.
Credit: TEM of D. radiodurans acquired in the laboratory of Michael Daly, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD, USA
In this project The Xenotext, Bök, who has taught himself molecular biology and computer programming, used three letter nucleotide ‘words’ to represent each letter in the alphabet. Using these words, he translated his poem into a synthetic gene, X-P13, which was inserted into Escherichia coli. This codes for a protein, and using a second cipher, the amino acids can be translated back into a second poem.
In the original project, the DNA fragments were transmitted correctly through 100 generations. As D radiodurans is an extremophile that is resistant to heat, cold, radiation and dehydration, messages in the bacteria could be a potential way to store data through very extreme conditions, such as nuclear catastrophe. Bok’s next step is to encode The Xenotext into the more durable D radiodurans, too.
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