C-A-K-E spells DNA cake

It was my turn to bring cake for cake club at work. Your turn only comes around once a year or so, so I thought I’d make something interesting. Inspired by Jonathan’s DNA cake, and by the four colours in use for the four products at our company, I designed a cake with a repeating DNA sequence, that, when translated, becomes a short peptide with the amino acids Cysteine – Alanine – Lysine – Glutamic Acid. Or, in their one-letter codes, C-A-K-E.

There are multiple possible DNA sequences that all spell out C-A-K-E, because the code is degenerate, but I went with this one:

TGCGCGAAAGAA

I picked a colour for each base, and started drawing coloured bars underneath the corresponding letters.

Then I figured out how many helix turns would fit on the cake, and how many base pairs would fit in a turn, and when it was time to ice the cake, I recreated my sketch in icing.

Eagle-eyed geneticists will have spotted that I made a mistake, but I didn’t notice this until it was pointed out to me on Twitter after it had already been tweeted and retweeted to at least ten thousand people!

Argh! *headdesk*

I can’t believe I forgot to consider the turns… After I figured out how many base pairs fit in a turn, I should have alternated every other turn so that the sequence stayed on the same strand.

So my DNA cake didn’t pass rigorous scientific peer review, but it tasted good anyway.

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