Successful preservation of Digital Objects (DOs) ultimately demands a solid theoretical framework. Such a framework with a high degree of generality emerges by treating DOs as containers of functional genetic information, exactly as in the genomes of organisms. We observe that functionality links survival in organisms and utility in DOs. In both cases, functional information is identifiable in principle by the consequence of its ablation. In molecular biology, genetic ablations (mutations) and environmental ablations (experimental manipulations) are used to construct interaction maps fully representing organismic activity. The equivalent of such interaction maps are dependency networks for the use of DOs within their Digital Environment (DE). In the poster we will present early work on the application of the theoretical background. It includes first results from a case-study examining a software-based art preservation scenario (SBA) developed as part of the PERICLES FP7 project [1].