Nowadays we are generating an immense amount every day., so we need more and more methods to store all this information, methods that must also be efficient and durable. We have already seen proposals such as quartz disks, but the one that is being most popular within the technological community is DNA.
Seth Shipman, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, has published a new milestone in this field, as they have for the first time managed to store a file in the DNA of a living organism, something that had only been achieved in synthetic DNA.
After many companies have invested in DNA storage, such as Microsoft, this is the first time it has been achieved in the genomes of living bacteria * Escherichia coli *. This has been possible thanks to the use of CRISPR gene editing system, with which they have managed to insert an animated image of 36 x 26 pixels.
The researchers turned each pixel of the animation into nucleotides, thus forming the DNA blocks. The chosen image was one of the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was the first to create photographs in motion in the 1870s. Project managers retrieved the data by sequencing bacterial DNA, thus obtaining 90% accuracy by reading The pixel nucleotide code. A real achievement.
We are witnessing a significant advance in testing the limits of DNA storage, a breakthrough that will allow us to experiment with human cells and open the door to the almost unlimited model of storage and offers a new perspective for the storage of information in an organism that Can be transported and copied, as we do with a simple USB stick.
This is undoubtedly one of the most important steps in DNA storage, a technique that assures us that in the future we will be able to store a large number of large files in a small molecule invisible to the naked eye, a molecule that we can even carry in Our body and see the birth of so-called 'bacterial hard disks'.
