Researchers have used the microbial immune system CRISPR–Cas to encode a movie into the genome of the bacterium Escherichia coli.
The technical achievement, reported on July 12 in Nature, is a step towards creating cellular recording systems that are capable of encoding a series of events, says Seth Shipman, a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. While studying brain development, Shipman became frustrated by the lack of a technique to capture how cells in the brain take on distinct identities. This inspired him to explore the possibility of making cellular recorders.
“Cells have this privileged access to all sorts of information,” he says. “I would like to have these molecular recordings functioning in the developing nervous system and recording information.”
Source and further reading:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lights-cameras-crispr-biologists-use-gene-editing-to-store-movies-in-dna1/?sf98331545=1
Image:
Original images of the galloping mare Annie G. (left) are shown next to images encoded into bacterial DNA and recovered (right) using the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
Credit: Seth Shipman via GIPHY
source: Corina Marinescu
No comments:
Post a Comment