Background

Since ancient time, people have been seeking for safe ways of information storage and transfer to combat message leaks that have recently become a public security problem and greatly concerns all over the world. To overcome this, encryption technologies have been developed and widely used to ensure the safety of important information.

For example, the Da Vinci code cylinder was recorded in the Da Vinci manuscript. If the messages were retrieved in a wrong way, the letter with the white phosphorus would be self-destroyed.

However, these self-destruction approaches could not provide sufficient confidentiality. Then the steganography technique was developed, by which the information could only be present after special treatments, like dipped in alum water, instead of being read directly with naked eyes.

In 1854, the Playfair cipher invented by Charles Wheatstone made the English alphabet frequency statistical analysis useless. This method is convenient and safe to be used, which also provides a great reference to our password books.

Recently, two biological encryption systems built on the spores of Bacillus subtilis have been used to safely send a key and an encrypted message, respectively. Based on the previous work, we planned to establish a DNA-based information storage and transmission system of high safety using the knowledge and techniques of synthetic biology and computer science, and this time, we used yeast to achieve our goal.

In this project, we built an information storage and transfer system with high security on using yeast spores, which consists of six modules, including “CODING”, “WRITE IN”, “LOCKING”, “MISLEADING”, “TIME DELAY SUICIDE” and “READ OUT”. Together with the computation methods developed in this project, we designed and incorporated a considerable number of genetic parts into the six modules above to ensure the safety of information stored in and transferred using our system.

Team:NEFU China/Background

Background