Living and Thriving DATA

Pre-Requisites:

By feeding strings of human-written data into colonies of bacteria, scientists have discovered a way to turn tiny cells into living and thriving hard drives.

A team of Harvard scientists led by genetic scientists Seth Shipman and Jeff Nivala have just developed a fascinating way to write chunks information into the genetic code of living, growing bacterial cells. It could be the code for a computer program or the lines of a poem. Either way, these living memory modules can pass this data onto their descendants (progeny), and scientists can later read that data by genotyping the bacteria. As Shipman explains in a paper in today in journal science, his method can upload roughly 100 bytes of data.

Representation of Bacteria

Bacterial Bytes

To be clear, scientists have already proven they can synthetically manufacture DNA in the lab and write into it pretty much whatever they want, including a full book about anything.

"But working within a living cell is an entirely different story and challenge," says Shipman. 

"Rather than synthesizing DNA and cutting it into a living cell, we wanted to know if we could use nature's own methods to write directly onto the genome of a bacterial cell, so it gets copied and pasted into every subsequent generation."

Before this experiment, the most information any scientist had ever permanently uploaded into a living cell was 11 bits of information. That's a mere 11 zeros and ones of binary data, and less information than your computer requires to code for two alphabets. This new technique expanded this record to roughly 100 bytes of data. For reference, it would take your computer precisely one hundred bytes to encode this very sentence.

The Harvard genetic scientists used a fascinating immune response that certain bacteria have to protect themselves against viral infection. In the parlance of geneticists, this response is called the CRISPR/Cas system, and it's actually quite simple:

Basically, when these bacteria are invaded by viruses, they can physically cut out a segment of the attacking virus's DNA and then paste it into a specific region of the bacteria's own genetic code. This allows a bacteria to remember what a certain virus looked like in case it ever tries to invade again. Not only that, but this genetic memory is passed on to the bacteria's progeny, transferring the viral immunity to future generations.

The team found that as long as you introduce a segment of genetic data that looks like viral DNA to a colony of bacteria carrying this CRISPR/Cas system, the bacteria would consume up and incorporate it into their genetic code. This method is being used by scientists to turn a colony of bacteria into a collection of tiny hard drives.

                                                                             

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