Reverse Engineering Life: A teardown of the DNA source code of a whole bacterium (WHY2025)

Love reverse engineering? You'd be right since you always find something interesting! In this talk we're going to study absolutely every byte of the DNA source of a real bacterium. And in doing so, we'll find bootstrapping code, genes, duplicate genes, anti-viral defense mechanisms, idiomatic/non-idiomatic/borrowed code & much more. It helps if you've also visited the companion talk on DNA, but this presentation is broadly accessible even without prior knowledge. A typical bacterium has around one megabyte of DNA as its source code. And with our digital reverse engineering hat on, it turns out we can analyse this code and quickly learn things. Where do genes begin and end? What is the stuff between genes? How do bacteria bootstrap themselves? And, where do microbes store their immune system? Using digital skills, all this can be found just by looking at the DNA letters. And that is what we'll be doing in this talk. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/LUXFSP/