People often say that our genome is like a language. For example, a recent science paper explains that “genomes appear similar to natural language texts, and protein domains can be treated as analogs of words.”1
If just encoding text, one way is to convert each letter of the alphabet into a three-letter code. Using three bases, such as A, C, and T, gives 27 combinations—enough for the English alphabet plus a space—with a code such as AAA = A, AAC = B, and so on (1 in graphic below). However, researchers often want to encode more than just text, so most current methods instead first translate data into binary code—the language of 1s and 0s used in electronic media. Using binary, the four bases of DNA could theoretically store up to two bits of information per nucleotide, with a code such as A = 00, C = 01, and so on Catherine Offord, “Infographic: Writing with DNA” at The Scientist
In 2017, one Harvard group encoded a video, an image of one of the earliest surviving motion pictures, in a DNA sample from bacteria:
But in some ways, our genomes are much more powerful than words. They are part of a process that utters not just ideas but living beings. Including human beings, who ourselves have ideas.
In August 2017, researchers announced that they had used DNA to encode malware to hack a computer program that reads genetic sequences:
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