""Forget invisible ink or lemon juice – spies can now send messages hidden in genetically engineered bacteria. The new method, dubbed steganography by printed arrays of microbes (SPAM), uses a collection of Escherichia coli strains modified with fluorescent proteins that glow in a range of seven colours.
Each character of the message is encoded using two colours, creating 49 possible combinations – enough for the alphabet, the figures 0 to 9 and a few other symbols. "You can think of all sorts of secret spy applications," says David Walt, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, who led the research.
Messages are grown on agar plates then transferred to a thin film that can be sent in the post to the recipient. The film appears blank in everyday conditions, but the message is revealed when the recipient transfers the bacteria to an appropriate growth medium.""Additional Uses & Continuation of Article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20965-spies-could-hide-messages-in-genemodified-microbes.html
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