Yea, i love movies and also science, but joining them both? That's supersonic. Researchers has encoded the data of a very short movie into the DNA of bacteria. They were also able to retrieve the information from the genetic code of the bacteria and play it back.
HOW DID THEY DO IT THEN?
Researchers took five frames from an 1870s classic movie about a race horse. This movie was broken down into several pixels. The DNA was used to create a genetic code for each pixel and its location within the image.
These researchers then inserted these codes into the bacteria, the bacteria then incorporated the fragments into their genome naturally. later, the researchers sequenced the bacteria DNA to reconstruct the movie with a 90% accuracy.
These findings may have limited application in real life but obviously, the purpose of this is beyond storing videos in the DNA. According to the studies co-author Seth Shipman, a post doctoral fellow at havard medical school in Boston, the research was to create "molecular recorders" that would record events inside the cells as they play out. This would give scientist a greater insight on the cellular activities that are very hard to observe as they happen in real time.
"We want to turn cells into historians" shipman said in a statement. "We envision a biological memory system that much smaller and more versatile than today's technologies, which will track many events non intrusively over time".
original article: https://amp.livescience.com/59791-dna-movie.html