Eduardo Kac, "Cypher", transgenic poem, 2003.


Code created by Kac for "Cypher".

The poem is composed in natural language directly with a high statistical incidence of the four letters that represent the bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. The set of remaining letters is formed by four consonants and two vowels. With the objective of decreasing the ambiguity in the nucleotide sequence (so that the code is clear) and at the same keeping it as short as possible (to improve molecular efficiency), the four consonants were assigned double letters representing the nucleic acids. The two vowels were corresponded with triple letters representing the nucleic acids.


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