Engineering Forever Bacteria: Lydia Contreras, Christian Bök and the Xenotext скачать в хорошем качестве

Engineering Forever Bacteria: Lydia Contreras, Christian Bök and the Xenotext

World-renowned poet Christian Bök and Texas Engineer Lydia Contreras have collaborated to make a piece of art that can live on forever. They have used synthetic biotechnology to encode one of Bök’s poems about a famous Greek tragedy, implanting this poem into a “deathless bacterium” that, in turn, recites a complementary poem, expressed as an engineered, RNA-encoded protein. This work is the centerpiece of a new book called The Xenotext: Book 2, the second entry in a series Bök has worked on for over 25 years. The first entry, released in 2015, serves as proof of concept. Bök gives readers a refresher in genetics, showing his first steps in developing this poetic microbe, encoding his work into a much less durable organism. This time, he has fully accomplished his goal, with the help of Contreras and her research team, led by graduate student Antonio Cordova. Together, they have encoded a poem, written in the limited language of DNA, inserting this gene into Deinococcus radiodurans, an “extremophile” microorganism, otherwise known as “Conan the Bacterium” because it is among the most resistant to tough conditions, like desiccation, UV light, and radiation. Bök was inspired by scientific research focused on extraterrestrial communication as well as technologies for the genetic engineering of bacteria. Bök started on this quest to make real the sci-fi idea of using bacteria to encode messages for other species across the universe to read, while making something that could outlive us all. He worked with several partners throughout his project. He found Contreras and her work on Deinococcus radiodurans, and so he cold-emailed her, kicking off what has become a years-long partnership. While this exciting feat has immense implications for creating living art, the potential applications go beyond this accomplishment. Robust tiny organisms can better store information than any man-made technology. Scientists across disciplines are hard at work figuring out how to use these skills to revolutionize modern data storage because the future of technological growth demands more efficient methods for archiving data. Learn more at https://cockrell.utexas.edu/news/cona... 00:00 Orpheus 00:28 The Xenotext 00:57 The project's goal 01:40 The language of love 02:08 The myth of Orpheus & Euridice 02:21 Euridice Follow the Cockrell School: Twitter:   / cockrellschool   Facebook:   / cockrellscho.  . Instagram:   / cockrellsch.  . LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/CockrellSchoolLI #Engineering #TexasEngineering #WhatStartsHere