The Watermark Thing Was Cool, But This Sounds More Reliable

A study out of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab published recently in Genome Biology has identified a set of DNA oligomers that can be used as part of DNA signatures to tell plasmid vectors from natural plasmids and bacterial genomes. Carl Zimmer explains the work in a Wired blog post: "There are sets of DNA segments measuring just a few dozen base pairs long that are found in almost every known vector and in no natural genomes. The scientists ... could identify vectors 98 percent of the time." The work, he says, could be useful for detecting engineered bioterrorist pathogens.