Maximum respect to the clever people at Wired who have decoded the secret messages in Craig Venter’s new synthetic chromosome. Released last week, the genome contained “watermark” sequences to differentiate it from the genomes of natural examples of Mycoplasm genitalium to prove it was truly synthetic.

It’s hard to write a catchy message using just the four letters found in DNA; but every DNA sequence can be translated into a lists of amino acids (give or take the odd stop codon), and each amino acid has a one letter symbol. 20 amino acids thus allow you to write pretty much anything you might want to, if you’re willing to use some creative spelling.

Here’s Wired’s reading of the watermarks

VENTERINSTITVTE

CRAIGVENTER

HAMSMITH

CINDIANDCLYDE

GLASSANDCLYDE

Authors on the paper in Science included Venter, Hamilton Smith, John Glass, Clyde Hutchison and Cindi Pfannkoch.

Wired thinks it is disappointing, although perhaps not unexpected, that the team went for personal glory over something more profound. But signing your work is hardly an ignoble act. What do you want: “The eagle has landed”? “We come in peace for all mankind”? “One small step for a Ham”? I’m just grateful they didn’t insert the number of their patent application in roman numerals…

My boss points out that Wired has a track record in messages encoded in gene sequences.

Image: Getty