Real DNA encryption (or at least making it hard to decode/change)
So I'm the owner of a startup which is going to make our lives easier with custom-DNA creatures! Our few first products are selling very well and nothing was wrong until last week's events.
Another company has bought one of our products and just decoded the entire DNA sequence, then changed a few things and resold them as their own, consuming our income. It's pretty bad for us, but still ok, because we are able to sue them.
Now imagine if some terrorists stole our viruses (nothing illegal, we use them for therapy) and changed (well-developed, readable) code to do some really bad things (like just killing for a start - or even worse).
So our plan is to set up some sort of encryption! But it seems hard to do.
Is there any easy way to set up encryption, or at least make DNA way less readable?
Bonus points for
- Encrypting RNA too
- Cells dividing without a decryption process
- Some DNA variations
- Making protein sequences harder to find as well
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/127851. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
The big problem here is that the organism has to be able to decode its own DNA. Therefore the "decryption mechanism" has to be built-in in the organism.
You can make it more obscure by hiding the important bits in lots of junk DNA. You can make decoding and encoding more difficult by using things like non-standard base pairs, and non-standard amino acids. Then the competitor can't just use off-the-shelf products to do their cloning with, they have to develop the same infrastructure from scratch your company uses to engineer them.
But ultimately, you can't hide the genetic code from a well funded opponent, because the competitor can just reverse engineer what the organism does to read its own DNA.
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