
Infection of biological DNA with digital Computer Code - kyberias
http://pastebin.com/9vN1ACMH
======
Blahah
This is pretty trivial - of course we can encode anything we want in DNA -
people have done cool things with this since synthesis was first invented. And
assuming DNA synthesis technology continues to improve rapidly we might even
be able to synthesise bacterial genomes routinely in the next 10 years.

So you can write a computer program to a bacterium. Then you can sequence it
and the code goes back to being stored on a computer.

But it ends there - the code never gets executed again. FASTA files are just
text files that would rarely have executable permissions and never actually be
executed by a user. Most boring and uneventful outbreak ever.

~~~
3pt14159
Not boring or uneventful at all! An amazing way of transmitting information
across eons or under in regimes of restricted communication!

If I can infect a common fly with my stenographed, encrypted message, then I
can communicate with people in China! I can translate our major books in every
language and hide that data in cockroaches! If we ever nuke ourselves so badly
that we only have people living in bunkers, then maybe one day they will
discover that we hid all of our knowledge in life! Maybe this has already
happened! Maybe aliens did so with mathematical proofs when they discovered
our world an eternity ago!

I reject your claim of boring! THIS IS AMAZING!

~~~
angersock
Angersock's 1st Rule of Storage:

"Any sufficiently advanced compression or encoding is indistinguishable from
/dev/null"

~~~
nitrogen
I would choose /dev/urandom. But you might as well be writing to /dev/null.

Edit: beat by 3 minutes and a stale cached page.

------
wf
Right now I can go to one of many websites to encode a program into a DNA
sequence[0] and then to another website to paste that sequence into a text box
and order that DNA.[1] This is all doable right now by every one of us. It's
just not _useful_ yet.

[0][http://www.sgidna.com/translator.php](http://www.sgidna.com/translator.php)
[1][http://dna.macrogen.com/eng/service/seq/standard/standardseq...](http://dna.macrogen.com/eng/service/seq/standard/standardseq.jsp)

edit: Let me add that I think this is crazy interesting and even if the DNA is
never executable itself, it's a very very interesting way to store a program
that can later be extracted.

~~~
jordan0day
I was at Compute Midwest (a tech conference in Kansas City, Missouri) this
past fall and saw a demo of this very thing by Autodesk's Andrew Hessel. He
ordered some customized bacteria (maybe yeast? I don't exactly recall) with
the conference title encoded and then sequenced into the microbes. It was very
interesting to me that that level of manipulation is available to any of us,
right now (even if it's not exactly useful).

It did bring up some concerns, though -- do we now have mail-order anthrax
manufacturing? This isn't something I'm seriously worried about, but it does
seem like something to consider in the future as this technology evolves.

Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make an
awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a password,
we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make
an awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a
password, we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!_

Was the first thing that occurred to me too. Talk about steganography.

~~~
vwinsyee
>Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make an
awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a password,
we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!

First occurred to me as interesting too. Then I realized that you'd be
dropping your private key in every toilet you defecate into. Not to say that
secure intra-body information storage isn't possible though.

Then again, re: the steganography -- gut flora's pretty diverse (and there's a
lot of it). People might not necessarily think to, or want to, dig through
your shit.

------
TezzellEnt
I'm not sure the validity of the post or the information therein. It did lead
me to think of some futuristic use of implanting data into DNA:

Could it be possible for someone to take a corporate secret or information,
translate it into DNA, incorporate the DNA into a virus, and then infect
themselves with said virus? While they are incubating say, the common cold,
they could be in physical transit to their destination with no electronic
device. The virus could ultimately be extracted and it's information sold to
the highest bidder.

Actually, it sort of reminds me of a novel by Alan Dean Foster - Sagramanda
[http://www.amazon.com/Sagramanda-A-Novel-Near-Future-
India/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Sagramanda-A-Novel-Near-Future-
India/dp/1591024889)

~~~
Blahah
This would be possible but not a good data storage strategy - high mutation
rates would lead to very rapid data degradation. A workaround would be to
design a highly redundant encoding so the probability of sequence
modifications altering the encoded information was low.

~~~
3pt14159
No it doesn't work like that, mutation isn't uniformly high, some sectors are
very stable.

~~~
kyberias
Wait, yes it does! Mutation rates may be small over generations due to
SELECTION. We're talking about nonsense DNA that does not have any purifying
selection pressure, ie. it does not encode any useful or critical protein for
the organism.

~~~
3pt14159
But some segments of DNA are effectively unchanging and you can place the
message in those segments "junk" sub-segments.

~~~
arca_vorago
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the zombie apocalypse started...

Anyway, those areas you guys are calling non-coding and "junk" do a lot more
than we understand, and I would venture modifying them willy nilly could have
some pretty nasty outcomes.

~~~
3pt14159
Actually, we're beginning to understand them more and more. Remember, if it
was as easy as a mutation here or there then the zombie apocalypse would have
already started. I'm much more afraid of grey goo (look it up) than punching
out some TAGACAs.

~~~
arca_vorago
On the ZA, who says mutation is the mechanism, maybe someone wants the ZA to
start....

On non-coding regions, we are indeed learning more and more, but these
developments are relatively recent and there is much more to be discovered.

As for the grey goo... well, that would be quite the singularity, wouldn't it?

------
fabian2k
Creating an artifical bacterial genome and transplanting it into a bacterium
is still a huge effort and far from routine. As far as I know it has only been
done once, and it did cost some tens of millions of dollars.

Genetic manipulation is typically done at a much smaller scale, and not by
exchanging an entire genome. And on a small scale it would be very unlikely
that such a switch would go unnoticed.

The way back from bacterium to executable is also extremely unlikely, there
would be enough mutations after some generations that the program is unlikely
to run at all.

------
bfe
And next thing you know, the Melding Plague:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_Revelation_Space#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_Revelation_Space#Melding_Plague)

~~~
andrewflnr
Yikes. That was one of the most horrifying parts of the series.

------
VLM
"developed an encoding technique from DNA to human letters"

Should have used UTF-8. Also human letters does not equal greco-roman capital
letters. Wake me when they embed some kanji.

~~~
mattstreet
All you need to encode ANYTHING in DNA is 2 or more symbols. IF nothing else
you encode whatever data you want into binary.

kanji -> UTF-8 -> Binary -> DNA.

~~~
VLM
Not buying it. The point of the article was coding roman letters. Its a
"cheat" to claim it supports UTF-8 klingon glyphs because technically its
possible to write the string:

"U PLUS SIGN F EIGHT E FOUR" is the glyph for Klingon TLH.

Or more likely given the limited codespace its actually:

"U PLUS SIGN F VIII E IV" is the glyph for Klingon TLH

"real" unicode support would look like an imaginary packed UTF-5bit rather
than existing UTF-8 or a roman letter prose description of UTF-8

As a meta discussion, much as being able to encode arbitrary text including
source and executables "proves" that bio-mechanical DNA virii are possible, I
guess this post where Klingon glyphs can be described in someone elses roman
letter glyphs in earth DNA also "proves" that inter species human klingon
romance and reproduction is viable (I'm sure to the relief of Lt Paris and Lt
B'Lenna).

(edited to add because of codon degeneracy I'm claiming we should only pack 5
binary bits per codon, I know there's 6 theoretical bits per codon and only
(about) 4 bits of amino acid per codon so I split the difference and went for
5. Its an interesting puzzle, do you allow any codon even if its biologically
nonsense or are you writing a distinct amino acid alphabet using the codon as
a representation of the amino acids?)

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kovalkos
This is an interesting, albeit somewhat scary, application of Automaton
Theory.

Scientists shouldn't be rushing with this kind of thing (research for sake of
research), and we, as humanity, should carefully consider the implication of
this kind of things.

Btw, this reminds me of the old game called Core Wars
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War)).

------
kyberias
My analysis is that it looks plausible and not really surprising if one knows
a little bit about molecular biology. The extension of this is that one could
find a vulnerability (buffer overflow maybe) in one of the software used by
gene analysts that can be used by the injected DNA to infiltrate a PC.

~~~
Blahah
It would be extremely surprising if any exploit could be triggered by a
particular valid DNA sequence (which it would have to be to be able to be
sequenced/synthesised).

------
Geee
Interesting, now I wonder if a malicious physical virus could form a digital-
physical symbiosis with an artificial intelligence and be able to evolve
itself through DNA synthesis with the said method and eventually wipe humans
and human controlled computers out of the game.

~~~
axus
I'd be more worried about someone taking a known sequence like modified HN51
or smallpox as the payload. Next, combining it with effective malware that
targets FASTA files. One of those "incautious scientists" thinks they are
synthesizing something benign, not taking precautions, and a highly infectious
disease pops out.

------
mkesper
Is this April's fools day?

------
dschiptsov
Never imagined that someone else could love X-Files as much as I do.))

------
egeozcan
Is this real? If someone isn't rolling on the floor of their creepy, poorly
illuminated lab, laughing; this is huge!

~~~
kyberias
This is a theoretical concept based on real data and experiments.

------
luisbebop
nice project in python to encode binary files to DNA
[https://github.com/Allanino/DNA](https://github.com/Allanino/DNA)

