Harvard recorded animation in the DNA of a living organism

The term “viral video” acquires a new meaning in connection with an experiment conducted by scientists at Harvard Medical School. They managed to record digital information not just into the synthesized genetic material, but into the genes of the live E.coli bacterium. This means that a living organism can act as a carrier of digital information and store files directly in DNA.

Scientists have been experimenting with storing digital files in DNA for a long time, since this medium is great for digital information. In the end, this is just a code in the quaternary number system: the genetic program is encoded by four nucleotides, which are denoted by the symbols A, G, C and T, and it contains a lot of information in a limited space.

DNA file writing experiments have been particularly successful in the past five years. In 2012, the Harvard group wrote down a text book of 53,000 words in a DNA macromolecule synthesized. The absolute record was set in March 2017, when 200 megabytes of information was recorded in the DNA. Even Microsoft connected to these scientific experiments: a year ago it became known that Microsoft ordered the synthesis of 10 million DNA macromolecules with a specific nucleotide sequence from Twist Bioscience. Interestingly, the manufacturer manufactured the molecules, could not read the information recorded there, because it did not have a decryption key.

So far, all experiments have occurred predominantly with the synthesized DNA, the scientists have never been able to write digital information into a living organism, and then successfully read it. This is a much more complicated process, but Harvard researchers did this using the CRISPR genome editing technique.
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CRISPR (clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats) is based on the mechanism of anti-virus protection in the body. The immune system recognizes alien viruses, captures a DNA fragment from them and places it in the signature database, which is stored in the bacterial genome. Scientists deceived the system, slipping fragments of their animated file, frame by frame, instead of viruses. Deceived immune system itself folded of the desired sequence.

We chose one of the first ever animated images in the history of photography for recording - a black horse moving on a white background, which English and American photographer Edward Maybridge recorded on his farm in Palo Alto (California) in 1877. It was the world's first successful experience of chronophotography. Twenty years later, the Lumière brothers will take over the experience and call it cinema.


"The Horse in Motion" by Meybridge

An animated file with a 36 × 26 pixel horse was recorded in the DNA. Then, using DNA sequencing techniques, the researchers restored the animation to 90% accuracy.




The recording density of information in DNA is much higher than in flash memory or on magnetic media. About 1 gram of files (10²¹ bytes) can be written into 1 gram of DNA, and the entire human genetic program is placed in 1.6 GB . According to other estimates, if you count the total amount of information in the DNA of all human cells, then it turns out about 60 ST, and 99.9% of this information is the same for everyone.

The authors of the scientific work say that DNA has value not only as a carrier of existing information, but also as a means for recording biological processes in the body, which can then be read and decrypted as log files from the server. For example, science does not know how the development of cells occurs at an early stage. Indeed, all the diversity of human cells develops from completely identical pluripotent stem cells. For unknown reasons, some of these cells are transformed into brain cells, others - into internal organs, blood cells, etc. The process of choosing the role and time when the “decision” is made to turn into a particular cell, as well as about factors under the influence of which this decision is made, until they are completely investigated by science. Perhaps “digital” logs — a system for recording and storing information inside cells — will give a chronological record of cell development and help us understand the details of this process. But first, the system is checked for digital data.

It is curious that long before the development of molecular biology, Richard Feynman spoke about recording information in DNA: “Biology does not just write information, it does something with it,” he said in a 1959 lecture . That his lecture prompted Dr. Leonard Adelman (one of the co-authors of the RSA encryption algorithm, where his last name stands for the letter A) for the first experiments on writing data to DNA. In 1994, he reported that molecular calculations were able to solve a mathematical problem from combinatorics.

Progress in bioinformatics is going on at a crazy pace. The first sequencing of the human genome took several years and cost $ 3,000,000,000. Most optimists said that after 50-60 years we will be able to reduce the cost to $ 1,000. In fact, it took six years.

The scientific work was published on July 12, 2017 in the journal Nature (doi: 10.1038 / nature23017, pdf ).