Schematic diagram of bacterial DNA.
Hard disks, compact discs, video tapes, and audio tapes are all familiar data storage media that have been updated over the past hundred years. Now some scientists are looking at storing data in the genes of living organisms, and a recent study has successfully stored “Hello World” in the genes of living bacteria for the first Time using gene editing technology.
The advantages of storing data in DNA are that it does not take up space, it is resistant to physical attacks, and it can be “passed on from generation to generation”, which has attracted many scientists to invest in its research.
An equivalent amount of data requires about one-thousandth of the space required for DNA storage than the most efficient hard drives available today. For example, about one grain of salt can store the equivalent of 10 digital movies. As technology advances, DNA data will also become less expensive to write and read.
The essence of computer data is a large amount of information expressed by a combination of zeros and ones. Biologists can achieve the same effect with a combination of four bases, A, G, C and T.
In 2017, a research group led by Columbia University began writing data inside living organisms and passing it on to the next generation through the reproduction of the organisms.
That study used CRISPR gene editing in E. coli cells to recognize foreign biological signals, such as a fructose signal that would increase gene expression of a circular DNA called a plasmid when present. Afterwards, CRISPR’s shearing tool cuts the overexpressed plasmid into fragments and adds a portion of it within a specific segment of bacterial DNA.
When there is a fructose signal, the inserted gene fragment is like computer data with a digit value of 1 for the information. Without the fructose signal, the bacteria will store a digit of information equivalent to 0. When the researchers sequenced the DNA of E. coli and read out the information of 0 and 1 inside, they also read out the data record stored inside. In this way, the DNA of E. coli has some “memory” of the signals of the previous environment.
At the time, this study could only store two digits of information, and the fructose signal was not a convenient form of signal for computer systems to use. In the new study published this year, they improved the system to allow E. coli to recognize foreign voltage signals, also using gene editing to write data. This is closer to the data input form of a computer and can store up to 72 digits of data.
The study says they succeeded in writing the message “Hello world!” in E. coli. Not only that, but when the researchers mixed the information in the E. coli and other common soil microflora together for a week, the information was still intact.
Seth Shipman, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, said, “It’s a really good development.” But he also said the technology is still far from real-Life applications.
The study was published in January in the journal “Nature Chemical Biology” (Nature Chemical Biology).
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