DNA Typewriter

Scientists have developed a "typewriter" to encode data in DNA

Georgy Golovanov, Hi-tech+

DNA is much superior to digital storage media in terms of capacity — up to 215 million GB of data can be recorded in one gram, and maybe more. Scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA) have developed a method of encoding whole sentences in the DNA of a living cell, not just individual words.

A team of researchers has come up with a new system for recording information in DNA, simple and consistent. They called it DNA Typewriter ("DNA typewriter"). The system records short segments of DNA one by one, from left to right. Scientists have already created 4096 special characters that can be entered, and have shown how to place them in order so that full sentences can then be read.

Article by Choi et al. A time-resolved, multi-symbol molecular recorder via sequential genome editing is published in the journal Nature – VM.

The first sentence was a quote from the Bible "this is what God does!" (Numbers, 23:23), which at one time was chosen to transmit the first message by telegraph in Morse code. The second phrase — "Mr. Watson, come here!" — is also historical, it was uttered by Alexander Bell during the first phone call. The third was taken from a song by the Korean pop group BTS.

However, DNA Typewriter can be used not only to insert quotes into cells. According to the developers, thanks to this system, it became possible to track the activity and history of cells, which allows scientists to observe their development or monitor the reaction to medications.

During the experiment, the researchers traced how a cell of one of the HEK 293 (human embryonic kidney 293 cells) lines split into 1.2 million new cells over 25 days, analyzed their barcode and were able to reconstruct their family tree.

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