The most impressive photographic image stored on bacteria - the new type of human hard drive

Big step to landmark "turning living creatures into a USB storage data".

When we use DNA as a place to store data, we will never need the more complicated drives because this 'natural storage device' has a tremendous amount of storage: all your photos each shot, your whole massive music store, all 6 parts of Game of Thrones or all the important documents that you put in the machine can be up to hundreds of GB and will still have plenty of room.

And better, can you take that data with you to go anywhere and store it anywhere on your body, itself DNA? Currently, it is a distant prospect. But Harvard University geneticist George Church believes this scenario is feasible.

To prove that, the Harvard team of scientists used the CRISPR gene editing system to put an animation into a genome of a bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli species). ). They convert individual pixels of the image into nucleotides, the foundation bricks that make up a DNA.

They put a GIF of a total of 5 frames into a living bacterium, about a horse riding with a rider on his back, taken by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who first created animated photographs. stop motion in the 1870s. They were able to extract data by rearranging the DNA sequence of bacteria and by reading pixel codes in the nucleotide, they recreated the animation with accuracy up to 90%.

On the left is the original image, on the right is a photo recreated from bacteria.

This imaging method is especially applicable to bacteria, but Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist and biologist at Columbia University, who is not part of the research group, thinks these successes show us. It is possible to put information and data into living cells and gradually, we will be able to do so on human cells.

The world is currently generating huge amounts of data, and within 7 billion people traveling on this Earth, anyone's DNA can be used to store information. Have you seen scientists able to get data from DNA that has thousands or even millions of years of life? This is the evidence that DNA is a very efficient USB data storage device.

On the left is the original image, on the right is a photo recreated from bacteria.

Until now, studies using DNA as a 'drive' contain data based on synthetic DNA created by scientists. And this tiny 36 x 26 pixel GIF image is no exception, not even comparable to the record data that scientists can store on a previously synthesized DNA. However, it is harder to upload data to a living cell than to put data into a synthetic DNA, because living cells continuously move, change, divide and die.

Researcher Erlich said that one of the advantages of storing data in living cells is that information will be better protected. Some bacteria can still survive a nuclear explosion, when exposed to radiation or when encountering extreme environmental temperatures.

And not just at the data storage level, Seth Shipman - a scientist working at Harvard, who led this experiment - said that he wanted to use it to create 'living sensors' , possibly record what happens inside the cell and the environment around them.

Although this technology has not yet reached the limit of 'loading into your body a large amount of data' , it is still an effective research tool right now. We can record very small events, occurring at the molecular level, and thereby observe the evolution and evolution of different types of cells.

Mr. Shipman said that you can put these 'bacteria drives' in your body or drop it anywhere, give it a record of the data it finds and through its DNA analysis, we will know. Get new information that can, human beings have not found yet.