#WILL ZEBRA WORK WITH ZEBRA 2 CODE#
However, although the code is frequently right, it’s often wrong. I report back, bringing samples for a show-and-tell session. Then, a few 11-week generations down the line, bar-coded fish. Over the next few months, I create fish with smudges and blotches, fish with swirls, chess-board fish, fractal fish, kaleidoscopic fish. I throw CRISPR at them, zinc fingers and more. Like their hoofed namesakes, zebrafish have stripe-defining genes it’s just a matter of figuring out where they are. Zebras are unpredictable, rare in California, and they bite. Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
They slide across another piece of paper. Well, it might work, I tell them, but it’d take decades of research. There’s a big number on it, preceded by a dollar sign. They slide a piece of paper across the table. I shake my head it’s impossible, irresponsible and probably illegal. Think how much money our supermarkets will save. Self-bar-coded chick peas, bananas, halibut. From one such experiment, anything is possible. Not one, but modify enough stripy genes, and you could create a zebra that scanners will recognize. Before they can attempt an answer, I continue: Anyway, it won’t happen. Tweak those genes, et voilà: a zebra dressed in its own personal bar code.Īnd why would I want that? I ask.
Zebra genes contain the recipe for those stripes, right? I’m a CRISPR guy, so the role of genes is hardly news to me. You’ll re-engineer plants and animals so they grow their own bar code. Picture a lettuce leaf, they say, with a bar code drawn in chlorophyll, or a lemon with a scarlet bar code embedded in its peel. They call me a smart ass.Ī zebra’s stripes are meaningless, I tell them. You can’t tell, I say zebras don’t fit on the supermarket scanner. What information is in its bar-coded stripes?
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