Biologists Use Gene Editing To Store Movies In DNA (scientificamerican.com)

New submitter elmohound writes: A recent paper in Nature describes how gene editing was used to store a digital movie into a bacterial population. The choice of subject is a nice hommage to Muybridge's 1887 photos. From a report via Scientific American: "The technical achievement, reported on July 12 in Nature, is a step towards creating cellular recording systems that are capable of encoding a series of events, says Seth Shipman, a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. To develop such a system, however, his team would need to establish a method for recording hundreds of events in a cell. Shipman and his colleagues, including Harvard geneticist George Church, harnessed the CRISPR-Cas immune system best known for enabling researchers to alter genomes with relative ease and accuracy. Shipman's team exploited the ability to capture snippets of DNA from invading viruses and store them in an organized array in the host genome. In nature, those snippets then target an enzyme to slice up the invader's DNA. The team designed its system so that these snippets corresponded to pixels in an image. The researchers encoded the shading of each pixel -- along with a barcode that indicated its position in the image -- into 33 DNA letters. Each frame of the movie consisted of 104 of these DNA fragments." You can view the movie here, which consists of five frames adapted from Muybridge's Human and Animal Locomotion series.

Comments

CRISPR is game changing tech

[sg_oneill]

Although storing a *movie* in DNA isn't in it self particularly useful, this is an impressive feat and demonstrative of just how much of a revolution CRISPR really is. The golden age of gene tweaking we where promised is upon us. Now, what are we gonna do with it.

Birth of Bene Gesserit

[tavi.g]

Ever since I read the Dune series, Bene Gesserit was my favorite faction. To be able to draw upon the experience of your ancestors, have it within you and need no tech, what a treasure. And now, with these types of technology, I can't help but think how our knowledge could finally be encoded in our DNA. Think about being able to leave messages for your descendants encoded in your DNA. Or deeds, or a "species blockchain" that can record notable events.. Encoding brain-muscle memory for physical skills like martial arts or dancing.. what times to live in.

Maybe we'll have a specialized tumor/organ at some point in our bodies, holding just artificially inserted data and the mechanism to read that data and output it to one of our senses. Or even an Nth sense: "read DNA memory". Finally, a way for our species' knowledge to survive even if civilization collapses.