ChapterZero

Apparently Japanese scientists have worked out a way to store data in the DNA of a bacteria. They’re really on the ball when it comes to genetic engineering: they’ve also modified lettuce to produce miraculin, which may be the next great diet craze. Look for it in a store near you!

But seriously, imagine the possibilities that the informational bacteria open up. Assuming that the encoding and decoding processes can be streamlined sufficiently– it’s dubious that this will ever be feasible as a consumer technology, but one can hope– you could store information virtually invisibly, and diffuse it effortlessly. About a fourth of a megabyte of information can be geneered into a single bacteria.

This raises a lot of interesting math questions: if I wanted to ensure that the entirety of the Encylcopedia Brittanica was freely available within a square foot everywhere on the surface of the Earth (assuming the Earth is spherical, and that the bacteria could and would flourish on every surface, and each breed of bacteria carrying different information could coexist harmoniously with the other breeds, and that you addressed the problem of genetic drift corrupting the encoded information), how many geneered species of bacteria would I need, and given a population model for the bacteria, how would I perform optimum seeding? Or, if you’re into hard core stochastics, imagine coming up with models that could model the effects of genetic drift closely enough to facilitate the recovery of information corrupted by evolution/mutation.

Lots more questions I could think up, but the point is that this is so cool… and now I have to run home within 7 minutes to catch Heroes.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Mathematical Art (6/16/2005)
• Crazy spending (9/5/2007)
• Inpainting (11/18/2005)