bio.display

A similar approach to that used in bio.display has been utilized by David Walt, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University. They use fluorescent proteins of various colors to be able to encode 49 different characters, thus being able to encode the 26 letters of the English alphabet and 23 different kinds of signs.

They imprint the messages by placing e.coli into an agar gel, just like in bio.display. To read / decode the messages one has to activate the fluorescent protein genes in the e.coli – the same mechanism used in bio.display to make the images emerge.

• A Different Kind of Secret Code – Science Mag article
• Secret Codes in Bacteria – Bruce Schneier’s blog