Venter Institute's Synthetic Cell Genome Contains Hidden Messages
M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 JCVI When the J. Craig Venter Institute announced last week that it had created the first "synthetic cell," whose genome had been synthesized artificially one base pair at a time, Venter himself mentioned that the genetic code had been tagged throughout with watermarks that identify it as man-made rather than natural code. Now we're hearing that those watermarks weren't arbitrary. The code carries four hidden messages, little Easter eggs for genetics wonks to find and decipher. This isn't the first time Venter and company have played cheeky with genetic code. In 2008, researchers at JCVI used the four letters that identify the four bases in DNA -- A, G, C, and T -- to create a simple code based on codons, three-letter groups that code for amino acids. Using a different codon to represent one of 20 letters in the alphabet (not all letters are represented, so "v"...