Wired Science has ferreted out the secret amino acid messages contained in "watermarks" that were embedded in the world's first manmade bacterial genome, announced last week by the J. Craig Venter Institute.
As Andy Pollack paraphrased Venter in the New York Times, "These watermarks, Dr. Venter noted, contain coded messages. Sleuths would have to determine the amino acid sequence coded for by the watermarks to decipher the message." Functionally, the watermarks distinguish the synthetic genome from its natural counterpart. The Genbank sequence for the modified Mycoplasma synthetic genome contains five of these watermarks, and speculation has flown about what they were, as Venter refused to disclose them to press.
In response to a phone call from Wired Science, David Wheeler and Tao Tao of the NCBI checked into the genetic sequence submitted by Venter's Institute and found the watermarks hidden in plain sight. For the first time, we reveal the five coded messages that will go down in history as embedded in the first synthetic genome ever created after the jump. |