Programming E. coli
The E. coli K-12 genome in a picture
The picture above contains all of the information in the E. coli genome. It was created by converting all 4,639,675 nt of the genome into binary code. Each base (A,T,C,G) can be represented by 2 bits; the whole genome can be represented in 1,159,919 bytes (1.1 MB). Every possible 12 base DNA sequence can be represented as a unique 24 bit sequence, and the color of each pixel in a standard RGB picture can hold 24 bits of information (224 = 256*256*256). The color of each pixel in the image above uniquely represents the sequence of 12 bases of the E. coli genome. Reading the image in a raster format (left to right beginning at the top) can produce the sequence of the entire genome.
Cool, huh? All that E. coli does can be distilled down to a few bits. The challenge is learning how to reprogram it...