Professor Sri Kosuri’s work with alternative rock band OK Go to help release their newest album, encoded into DNA, has been highlighted by the New Yorker and Popular Science.
Popular Science (By Francie Diep): OK Go, the band behind viral music videos like that one with the treadmills, plans to release its newest album encoded into DNA later this year, the New Yorker reports. The band is working with Sri Kosuri, a biochemist now at UCLA who had previously worked on a Harvard University team that translated a book into DNA.
OK Go & Sri Kosuri
Kosuri will presumably use a similar method to turn OK Go’s “Hungry Ghosts” into DNA. First, the songs will get translated into binary, which, of course, already happens to songs that are recorded in digital formats. (The book was translated into HTML, then binary.) Then, the binary gets encoded into DNA’s A, C, G, and T bases. You choose one base-pair, A-T or C-G, to represent 0s and the other to represent 1s. Kosuri’s lab can build the custom sequence and store it in just a few drops of liquid in a little vial, which OK Go hopes to sell.
To read the full Popular Science article, please visit here.
The New Yorker article is available here.
