Forget Hard disk and pen drive Scientists just encoded digital movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria.
Memory is one of the most beautiful things we have. We store information, beautiful moments of life in our brain. An important function of memory is storage and reproducibility of information. From ancient time people used different mediums to store information. In ancient time people used cave paintings carvings as the time progressed books were used for the same. In recent decades we stepped in a new era of the digital world started with flippy, DVD to the latest hard drives. Despite this, we can't ignore important molecule used by nature for storing information for ages since the time we did not exist. Yes, that's DNA, DNA is an excellent medium for archiving data.
Recently there has been some effort to use DNA as storage material. The simple difference between the current digital world and DNA storage system is DNA has benefit to store information in 4 digits (ATGC) where the conventional digital devices work on binary (0,1). Scientist now has pushed their limits further and achieved some technical success. To store data and retrieve data using DNA it in live population. For this, they have utilized CRISPRS CAS system (Immune system of bacteria).
In short, Seth L. Shipman, Jeff Nivala, Jeffrey D. Macklis & George M. Church of Harvard University came up with idea that images and video can be encoded in DNA then put them in bacteria by utilizing the bacterial immune system and then again retrieve the information stored by using high-throughput sequencing:. I will explain exactly what they did in detail step by step.
Scientists have chosen these images instead of any random DNA seq. just to show that real time user data can be stored. They choose the single hand image (Single still image) and “The Horse in Motion,” one of the earliest series of moving images ever created. Now they Divided this video into 5 frames, now each frame is still picture.
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| Hand Still Image |
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| 5 frames from The Horse In Motion |
Step 2: Decoding Picture into the Nucleotide:
Now each picture was divided into color boxes according to shaded then each shade was designated a DNA code. For this scientist used the python script (Computer language).
Then these codes were put together with small DNA stretches and each stretch was labeled with a unique code (Spacer) which will help to put back the image together.
Step 3: Putting information in Bacteria:
Synthetically prepared DNA stretches were pooled together to form a complete image and were electroporated ( Electroporation process uses electric current making bacterial cell wall pores and make bacteria competent to take up DNA from the environment) into the E. coli bacteria.These bacteria were grown overnight and next day they were processed for next step.
Step 4: Recovery of the information and putting the image together:
On desired time according to the experiment bacteria were recovered DNA were read using the high-throughput sequencing. Now obtained data was recoded using the same script used to decode the data and images were reconstructed. And results were satisfied but not exactly same as the original image. But ultimately shows it works just we need to optimize the process further.
This is just starting we have road far ahead. This study eventually will create some novel bacterial systems which can detect the environment and record it in DNA.
Original article can be found at this link:
Also, I find this video about this on this link which is useful :
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