Genetics is no stranger to culture — numerous works of art, literature and architecture explore themes such as inherited disease, evolution and the structure of DNA. The latest trend has been to focus on individual variation. Now that many have access to elements of their own genetic make-up, there is no shortage of people hoping to make money by turning it into art.

Companies such as DNA 11 offer to run a restriction digest of your genomic DNA, and provide you with a colourful copy to hang on your wall. If this seems a little too cold and precise, DNA Art offers impressionistic paintings based on your restriction digest. It is not clear whether collectors of such artwork think a restriction digest is a revolutionarily new technology and that such images actually contain personal sequence data. While we are under no such misapprehension, we couldn't resist jumping on the bandwagon with this month's editors photos. We also enjoyed converting the Nature Reviews Genetics web site into a restriction digest with the Web2DNA Art Project.

If you do happen to have some of your own sequence, there are plenty of things you can do with it as a light-hearted alternative to worrying about its biological meaning. You can have it turned into a Genome Quilt, with a different patchwork pattern representing each base, or if you prefer to have something to listen to, the amino-acid sequence can be made into music by Gene2music. Even more bizarrely, you can turn your sequence, and by implication yourself, into a tree. Biopresence has invented an arbitrary code to represent your sequence in the degenerate third bases of tree codons.

These ventures include both the purely commercial and the innocently off-the-wall. Although both can provide some welcome entertainment, one wonders if they are really doing much to help the public understanding of genetics.