Sylvestre Marillonnet, Victor Klimyuk
& Yuri Gleba
A proof of principle
We have engineered a transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plant with a sequence encoded with following line from Virgil's Georgics in Latin: Nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt (English translation: "Neither can every soil bear every fruit").6 To translate this message from sequence data, only two codons must be changed from the one-letter amino acid code: GCC encodes O (not A) and GCG encodes U (not A). As far as we know, this is the first sentence purposely written that is self-multiplying as a part of normal plant reproduction. SM, VK, & YG
