Who needs hard drives? Scientists store information in living cells
LONDON: More than a century after his death, the stills and animations of the father of the motion picture, Eadweard Muybridge, have had a modern makeover — scientists have set them in DNA.
If cells can be made to store information, the applications are vast. Microbes could monitor environmental pollution. Neurons could record how the brain develops.
“What we’re trying to develop is a molecular recorder that can sit inside living cells and collect data over time,” said Seth Shipman, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School.
To build the prototype molecular recorder, the Harvard team hacked the immune defences that protect bacteria from invading viruses. When a bacterium is breached by an intruding virus, it releases enzymes to chop up the virus’s genetic code. To make sure it is prepared for future attacks, the bacterium remembers the invader by adding a chunk of the virus’s genetic code to its own genome.
Shipman and his colleagues created strands of synthetic DNA and fed it to E coli bacteria. The bugs treated the strips of DNA like viruses and dutifully added them to their own genomes.
The researchers left the bugs in a dish for a week during which time they grew and divided into new bacterial cells. Shipman then collected the bacteria and read out their genomes.
He found that the synthetic strands of DNA, which carried all the information needed to reconstruct the pictures had been spliced into the bugs’ genetic code.