Memes in your genes

Technology is weird.

An image and short film has been encoded in DNA, using the units of inheritance as a medium for storing information. Using a genome editing tool known as Crispr, US scientists inserted a gif - five frames of a horse galloping - into the DNA of bacteria. Then the team sequenced the bacterial DNA to retrieve the gif and the image, verifying that the microbes had indeed incorporated the data as intended.

In order to insert this information into the genomes of bacteria, the researchers transferred the image and the movie onto nucleotides (building blocks of DNA), producing a code that related to the individual pixels of each image. For the gif, sequences were delivered frame-by-frame over five days to the bacterial cells.

The data were spread across the genomes of multiple bacteria, rather than just one, explained co-author Seth Shipman, from Harvard University in Massachusetts. "The information is not contained in a single cell, so each individual cell may only see certain bits or pieces of the movie. So what we had to do was reconstruct the whole movie from the different pieces," Dr Shipman told the BBC.

To "read" the information back, the researchers sequenced the bacterial DNA and used custom computer code to unscramble the genetic information, which spits out the images. The team was able to achieve 90% accuracy: "We were really happy with how it came out," Seth Shipman told me.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40585299