DNA is the code of life. So many secrets are encoded into its simple four bases. Is it possible that if you found the right way to visualize this quintessential molecule that a secret message might appear? The face of Jesus?

To find out, I decided that the obvious solution to this pressing question was to make a quilt.

DNA has four bases, adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, represented by the letters a, t, c, g. These letters are just abstract representations of the real chemical structures of the bases, and not really great to look at when there are bunches in a row (like in actual DNA sequences). Example:

Informative, but not very nice to look at. Since the sequence is made up of only four letters, it is an easy task to convert each letter into a separate color. Additionally, there are two kinds of nucleotides—purines (adenine, guanine) and pyrimidines (thymine, cytosine). These groupings share similar chemical structures and so wouldn’t it be neat if the purines were the same color group and the pyrimidines a different one. And then wouldn’t it be neat if you could make a gene into a quilt??

Woah.

Here, each square represents a base pair and each triangle in the base represents one base within the pair. The colors represent bases as:

dark green = guanine,
light green = adenine,
dark blue= thymine,
light blue = cytosine

and this quilt shows the first 900 basepairs of the NADP gene of Agrobacterium vitis as shown in text above.

Now isn’t that nicer to look at?

So, a secret message didn’t appear, and neither did the face of jesus (whut), but it is interesting anyway to see what DNA looks like when represented by an alternate alphabet.

Quilting details:
The quilt fits a queen-sized bed. The squares are 2″ per side. And the quilting was done in this pattern:

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.