Project’s outlining
Hey all, how are you doing ? hope you all having fun!
This is my first post, which I wanted be short and introductory, but due to Khaled’s previous posts, which I find very useful, I think I can skip the introduction already and get to more precised topic as a last step for “drawing” the “shape” of our project in the reader’s mind.
Allow me to redefine some of the basic outlines for our project by introducing this simple Q&A form..
Q: Are you going to work on the live/real DNA ?
A: No,actually this is too far from the image we tend to draw for our project, we more aim to theoretically develop and implement techniques to be used for hiding data in DNA sequences.
Q: So how will you represent a DNA sequence if not using the real one ?
A: DNA sequences are already stored as information and available for the research purpose you can google GenBank and other providers for such information, you can simply think of a DNA sequence as a sequence of characters (string) with base of 4 characters (A,G,C,T) representing the genetic code, the same like a sequence of binary digits (0, 1) representing a computer machine code.
Q. What shape would the project’s deliverable take ?
A. As i noted before, we are building a technique for data hiding, and that implies developing an application that must perform the three basic functions of hiding on DNA data.
Q.What are the three basic functions of data hiding that your application should provide ?
A: Any data hiding technique consists of 3 basic functions/operations those are: Import, embedding and extraction. By those functions the application will be able to import DNA from a public online database (such as GenBank) and let the user select one of the implemented techniques for embedding data into a DNA sequence and/or extracting (retrieving) information from a DNA sequence carrying hidden data.
I hope I could reveal some of the ambiguity about our project in this short post
Thanks for reading and feel free to ask
and remember to feel more free to…
Have Fun 
Khaled Hamdy
ferasferas
Ahmed Yousef
Thanks Ahmed for the post its so useful. Actually when I’m starting to ask a question I find the answer in the next
I’ve only one question, What are latest results in the area of hiding info in DNA?
Thanks zikas for your reply,
If you are asking for the latest, there is an ongoing research in Japan since 2007 where they tend to use the DNA as the ultimate in permanent data storage media, they came after a conclusion that the information encoded into the live DNA could be inherited by each generation, thus they could be archived for hundreds of thousands of years, while the traditional media storage like CD-Rom, hard disk and flash memory can easily fall victim to accidents or natural disasters.
Just imagine the oldest data storage media could become the newest!
I honestly think that DNA computing field is a very “attracting attention” subject of our field of study (Scientific Computing & Bio-informatics)
This is Awesome speech
I Like The way of your talking …
Make us proud !
too simple and too useful
great post, keep going
rabena ma3ako ya shabab
SA, how are u ya shabab? It is great work I hope good results from it ISA but I have some questions?
1- What are file formats will u use for the DNA?
2-What about the errors or mutations that may be at the DNA DB record?
3-By your technique u will keep the function of the DNA but u will change the structure as i thought comparing the DNA structure with other related DNA will cause big delta how will u deal with this?
SA, Thanks for the very good questions, specially for a project “in progress”, It is more like the questions we put to ourselves and answer the more we go forward.
1- We are building our benchmark, one of the most obvious objectives is retrieving DNA information from a public online database, we have settled on a choice for EMBL-Bank http://www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/ and retrieving will be done easily using the bio-informatics toolbox in Matlab which deals (internally) with the data formats stored.
2- As we focus more on the “Hiding techniques” for hiding data into the retrieved DNA sequence, the errors in the sequence itself wont have any effect on most of the techniques. All papers we have collected so far agreed on that.
3- We are implementing many techniques and comparing them. The simple technique Khaled has illustrated before does change the DNA structure too much thus why it is referred by “Non-reversible data hiding technique” as we can’t restore the original DNA sequence after altering it’s structure (Codons). Further posts ISA will explain more the classifications of data hiding techniques.