Recently Craig Venter (who decoded the human genome) created a synthetic bacterium. The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) took a bacterium’s DNA sequence as a computer file, modified it, made physical DNA from this sequence, and stuck this DNA into a cell, which then reproduced under control of the new DNA to create a new bacterium. This is a really cool result, since it shows you can create the DNA of an organism entirely from scratch. (I wouldn’t exactly call it synthetic life though, since it does require an existing cell to get going.) Although this project took 10 years to complete, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before you will be able to send a data file to some company and get the resulting cells sent back to you.
One interesting feature of this synthetic bacterium is it includes four “watermarks”, special sequences of DNA that prove this bacterium was created from the data file, and is not natural. However, they didn’t reveal how the watermarks were encoded. The DNA sequences were published (GTTCGAATATTT and so on), but how to get the meaning out of this was left a puzzle. For detailed background on the watermarks, see Singularity Hub. I broke the code (as I described earlier) and found the names of the authors, some quotations, and the following hidden web page. This seems like science fiction, but it’s true. There’s actually a new bacterium that has a web page encoded in its DNA: