Like a hard drive it were, a team of scientists from the University of Harvard (EE. UU.) Have introduced a video of a horse at the f gallop otografiado by British Eadweard Muybridge, precursor of the first apparatus- the cinema cinematograph – in 1872, in the DNA of a living bacterium and they have recovered it later . This innovative method is based on the genetic cutter technique (acclaimed as a scientific milestone of 2015) and has been collected by the journal Nature.
It is an ambitious experiment that has been accomplished for the first time in history. Introducing these ancient images encoded into the DNA of living bacterial cells has represented a scientific challenge that tests the limits of the ‘biological hard drive’.
All the information a living being needs is stored in its genome, in tiny units of DNA. Scientists had already stored large amounts of data, including films, in DNA before, but it is the first time that it has been achieved not only to encode it but to reproduce it in live bacterial cells of E.coli (Escherichia coli ), a bacillus present in the gastrointestinal tract of humans and warm-blooded animals.
Aside from how surprising this scientific milestone is, the scientists claim that the technique used could allow living cells to become a real-time “molecular recorder”, capturing unseen biological developments within the body, like a kind of recorder of organic digital video.
“We want to turn cells into historians,” says neuroscientist Seth Shipman and co-author of the work.
Creating a biological memory
“We envision a much smaller and more versatile biological memory system than today’s technologies, which will track many events non-intrusively over time, ” Shipman clarifies.
The cells of the brain change with time and research this is such an interesting field as complex because t ales microscopic developments occur almost imperceptibly into living tissue (and changes quickly and to occur the same time). However, a new way of studying it could be by making living cells register such changes and can be reproduced later.
To test this idea,scientists converted each shaded pixel of the horse animation into a DNA code, designated by a particular configuration of the nucleobases or nitrogenous bases of DNA, adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. Thus, combined three by three they make up what we call the genetic code. Like the binary code of computers,they managed to encode images by substituting pixels for DNA nucleotides.
The researchers then used CRISPR gene editing technology to integrate this sequence of information into the bacterium’s genome.E. coli,adding a new animation frame every day.After a week, the bacteria divided and multiplied, passing the film to successive generationsas it progressed, like a biological file-sharing process.
Later, after sequencing the DNA regions extracted from a sample of the bacteria,the team was able to play the movie with 90% of the information intact, a successful test that suggests that living cells can record and retain information in sequence.
If this ability can be used to record other types of data, such as changes in gene expression,we might be able to track disease development in real time,or predict the onset of health problems when they are still preventable.
The new study shows that the hard disk of life has much to show and that cells could become tiny chambers within our own body.
Referencia: CRISPR–Cas encoding of a digital movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria. Seth L. Shipman, Jeff Nivala, Jeffrey D. Macklis & George M. Church. Published online 12 July 2017. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature23017
