Emily Waltz reports in a 23 August 2017 article at the IEEE Spectrum
magazine web site that researchers at Harvard have demonstrated
storing a movie within a living organism by digitally encoding it within
the DNA of E. coli.
By then sequencing the E. colli's DNA, they were able to recover and
play back the short movie.
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Originally Posted by Emily Waltz, IEEE Spectrum
Researchers for both experiments relied on electrical engineering principles to achieve their feats. In the DNA storage experiments, a team at Harvard University demonstrated for the first time how to encode a movie and an image into living cells. Storage of digital data in DNA has been achieved before—as much as 200 megabytes—but until now, no one had archived data inside a living organism, says Seth Shipman, a neuroscientist at Harvard who led the experiments.
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Originally Posted by Emily Waltz, IEEE Spectrum
To get a movie into E. coli’s DNA, Shipman and his colleagues had to disguise it. They converted the movie’s pixels into DNA’s four-letter code—molecules represented by the letters A,T,G and C—and synthesized that DNA. But instead of generating one long strand of code, they arranged it, along with other genetic elements, into short segments that looked like fragments of viral DNA.
E. coli is naturally programmed by its own DNA to grab errant pieces of viral DNA and store them in its own genome—a way of keeping a chronological record of invaders. So when the researchers introduced the pieces of movie-turned-synthetic DNA—disguised as viral DNA—E. coli’s molecular machinery grabbed them and filed them away.
The movie they stored was a 36-by-26-pixel GIF of one of the first moving images ever recorded: a galloping mare named Annie G., by Eadweard Muybridge* in 1887. The team was able to retrieve it, along with a separate image, with about 90 percent accuracy by sequencing the bacterium’s genome.
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Meantime researchers at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University
have demonstrated a biological computer by introducing synthetic DNA
into E. colli.
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Originally Posted by Emily Waltz, IEEE Spectrum
The “ribocomputer” can evaluate up to a dozen inputs, make logic-based decisions using AND, OR, and NOT operations, and give the cell commands. The system is the most complex biological computer to date and is one of the few that operates inside a living cell.
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Originally Posted by Emily Waltz, IEEE Spectrum
The biological circuit enables researchers to program cells to respond when they receive a particular type of input. For instance, cells could be programmed to light up or self-destruct when they sense the presence of a toxin or a marker of cancer.
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Article here :-
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/...iving-bacteria
