Scientists Just Took a Step Toward Using Living Cells as Hard Drives
A 72-bit message was encoded directly into bacterial DNA
Emily Mullin
Emily Mullin
Jan 21·4 min read
A scientist’s hand picks up bacterial colonies with a tube from a petri dish.
A scientist’s hand picks up bacterial colonies with a tube from a petri dish.
Photo: luchschen/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Humans are generating digital data at a rate that could eventually outpace our available storage. Sprawling data centers lined with rows and rows of computer servers currently allow us to store, back up, and recover our data, but they’re costly to maintain, take up too much space, and consume huge amounts of electricity.

That’s why researchers are so interested in a much smaller and denser form of data storage: DNA.

To store information in DNA, a data file’s binary code — zeros and ones — is first converted into the four DNA bases — A, C, G, and T. Then, scientists chemically synthesize strands of DNA to match the desired sequence. Recently, researchers encoded an episode of the Netflix show Biohackers and 52 pages of Mozart music into DNA. A major benefit of DNA storage is that unlike a floppy disk or flash drive, DNA will never be obsolete.
A Smear of DNA Can Hold 10,000 Gigabytes of Data
Facing a storage crisis, the U.S. is investing $48 million to turn DNA into living hard drives
onezero.medium.***

Whereas most of these efforts involve storing data in synthetic DNA made in a lab, Columbia University scientists recently stored data inside the DNA of living organisms. In a January 11 article in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers describe how they used the gene-editing tool CRISPR and electric stimulation to encode digital, binary data into Escherichia coli cells. The ability to do so, they explain, could open the door to better data storage options.

“It’s really hard to kill bacteria, which makes them great for information storage and long-term maintenance and protection of data,” lead author Harris Wang, PhD, associate professor of systems biology, tells Future Human.

Wang says that his team wanted a way to skip the manual step of converting binary code into DNA bases. Using a “genetic circuit” — a set of instructions that acts like an electrical circuit — and CRISPR, they built a system that recognizes voltage levels from a computer as zeros and ones and encodes them into the DNA of bacterial cells. Using the approach, the researchers electrically encoded the message “Hello world!” into E. coli. The message is only 72 bits — a very small amount of information compared to the hundreds of megabytes that have been stored in synthetic DNA. But encoding information in living cells is more difficult because they’re constantly moving, multiplying, and dying off.

The researchers also showed that they were able to pick out the encoded E. coli from a mixture of microbes and retrieve the message by extracting and sequencing its DNA.

It’s not the first time researchers have experimented with encoding information into living cells. Previously, a Harvard team led by geneticist George Church, PhD, used CRISPR to insert a GIF into E. coli. The researchers converted the individual pixels of each image into DNA bases and delivered the GIF into bacterial cells in five frames.

But the major advance with the Columbia group’s paper, says Albert Keung, PhD, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University, is the ability to directly record data from a computer into cells. He says it lays the foundation for direct connections between computers and biological systems.

Though the idea of hosting our data in bacteria may sound odd, it has benefits over both traditional data storage and synthetic DNA storage. A major advantage of storing data in living cells like bacteria is better protection. Whereas naked DNA degrades quickly, E. coli is hardy: Bacteria can survive a wide range of temperatures and endure radiation exposure. And, of course, cells are smaller than a hard drive or USB drive and can pack in a lot more information.

Beyond storing data, the technique could be used to make “living sensors” to record what’s happening in or around a cell.

“One could envision data storage applications where this would have many advantages,” Keung tells Future Human. For instance, scientists could use the system to record a series of biological events in an animal’s gut or sense toxins in soil. Eventually, information could be even hosted in human cells — like a tiny hard drive embedded in your skin.

“I think certainly in the future one could imagine that you could get your computer to directly encode something meaningful into the cell,” Wang says. “Here we’re talking about bacteria, but maybe you could even do this in the mammalian cell, and maybe that’s actually embedded in your skin.”

What kind of information might we embed in our skin someday? Wang speculates that cells could be a way to store personal medical records or biometric data.

But that’s still a long way off, Wang says. “Right now we’re just talking about the very basic step of how do you get cells to recognize what a computer spits out.”
Medium