Is it possible to communicate through DNA?
Alternatively, could DNA be a language (the normal coding that exists within DNA to tell it what to build) that is capable of telling us anything.
This question is based off of this article about aliens may be able to communicate to us through DNA
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/47612. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
There isn't a reason why not.
Computers communicate with just 1 and 0.
DNA has 4 chemical bases, and humans have around 3 billion base pairs.
There are sections of human DNA that are left over from ancient viruses, so it's not a great leap to think that a message could be encoded in DNA, put into a virus and inserted into a person's genome that way.
Then you'd only need to know where to look, have the equipment to extract and sequence it, and the key to decode it.
Edit: Encoding
The base chemicals for DNA are adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T).
If we arbitrarily assign them each a base 4 number to make a key:
A = 0
G = 1
C = 2
T = 3
Then we can use them in a message.
Take the phrase "Hello World".
In binary (base 2) that computers use, it would be 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01010111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100
In base 10 (normal) that would be "H"=72 "e"=101 "l"=108 "l"=108 "o"=111 " "=32 "W"=87 "o"=111 "r"=114 "l"=108 "d"=100
In base 4 it would be 1020 1211 1230 1230 1233 0200 1113 1233 1302 1230 1210
And using our key, it would be GACA GCGG GCTA GCTA GCTT ACAA GGGT GCTT GTAC GCTA GCGA
You could even encode a kind of primer in to let people figure out what the key is if they don't have it, similar to something SETI might use to help aliens figure out how to read a message we send them.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads