Wearing your genes

One of the projects we made at the Science Festival was DNA bracelets - using the sequence of DNA to make a brightly coloured strand of beads and then making a matching strand by following complementary base pairing rules. DNA has only 4 "letters" in its alphabet - A pairs to T, C pairs to G - so it's easy to pair a a red bead (T) to a green (A) , and a blue bead (C) to a yellow (G).

My little people had a fine old time making bracelets based on trout sequence:

That's fun and everything, but I'm a little too old to get away with wearing one. Instead I took two gauges of silvery wire, some glass crystals and a silver coloured bookmark and made this.

Believe it or not, this is the genetic code for "dottycookie" - or rather DTTYCKIE which is the closest you can get if you use the 20 letter amino acid (protein building block) alphabet to represent my name. If you give it a twist ...

Since DNA encodes protein sequence, you can represent words as proteins, and then backtranslate to figure out a corresponding DNA sequence, for example using this program. It's a long sequence as it takes 3 DNA letters to encode each amino acid.

It's the ideal adornment for a book about one of my heroines, and did serve a serious purpose - I needed wire wrapping practice for a project to be revealed in the fullness of time.

And if you think this is just plain daft, I take comfort in the fact that I'm not the only freak on the block - Emma Pebble pointed out some truly fabulously geeky objects for sale on Etsy ...