Although, to be fair, not all E.coli strains are harmful

Nov 18, 2014 13:03 GMT  ·  By

We've been hearing about the storage potential of DNA for a long time, but actually using the substance for data storage is a relatively recent breakthrough, and one that can't be practically applied yet. MIT wants to speed things up though.

If you're not familiar with Escherichia coli, commonly spelled E.coli, the bacteria is a Gram-negative, facultatively anaerobic, rod-shaped bacterium of the genus Escherichia.

There are some pretty harmless strains, all of them found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms, including humans.

There are some harmful strains too, though, and they have been responsible for many of the instances of food poisoning that resulted in the recall of food products on the market.

Fortunately, the MIT folks aren't going to try and persuade us to ingest these things, or do anything involving their roles in digestion.

Instead, a group of scientists has been researching the possible uses of E.coli DNA in data recording technology. Biological computing at its best, we suppose.

Bacteria have been turned into biological computers

Researchers at MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center were recently successful in their quest to record multiple analog streams of real-time environmental data into a population of bacterial cells.

They did modify the bacteria greatly beforehand, since they couldn't use DNA for storing digital information otherwise.

DNA microchips can, at present, hold binary information at a density of 700 TB per gram, if you can believe it, and it can go a lot higher than that, to 455 exabytes per gram. A shocking amount, but there you have it.

It's what made the MIT researchers consider the possibility of cells that double as real, biological supercomputers. It may not be nanite technology, but it's the closest thing we can envision with current science.

The MIT researchers took single-stranded DNA and recombined it with double-stranded DNA genome, leading to the creation of enzymes call Recombinases, although the researchers call them SCRIBEs (Synthetic Cellular Recorders Integrating Biological Events).

And it's all thanks to a three-decade-old paper that described a curious genetic structure found in soil bacteria. Called retron, the structure is an auxiliary-stranded DNA cache separate from the main double-stranded DNA of a cell.

It turns out that the retrons in an E.coli bacterium respond to the presence of certain chemicals, and their quantity. The rate at which the single-stranded DNAs recombine with the main double-stranded DNA of the cell was successfully raised by modifying the chemical composition, which proved key for the breakthrough.

What this means in layman’s terms

We have the basis for microorganism-sized supercomputers. Sure, it will take decades or maybe centuries to make good on the concept, but using DNA as storage is already possible.

So yes, it's only a matter of time before we can make cells capable of taking orders to, say, heal a cut or regenerate lost nerves. We'll make sure to report on the appearance of such “supercells” whenever they show up.

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