Hacker News Reader

Comment by TezzellEnt | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

It does work like that: in bacteria (as in the OP), there are no highly stable intergenic regions, and in viruses (as in grandparent's suggestion) where there are rarely significant intergenic regions at all, the mutation rates are the highest recorded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com