Artificial DNA -The Future Storehouse of Human Knowledge?

A million years from now, will our descendants still read works like Beowulf, Shakespearean plays, or even the Bible? Will they study any of the same mathematical concepts or scientific theories? If so, how will our data reach those future generations? It will likely be stored and continually transferred to the most advanced computer chip, right?

Wrong. Try bacteria.

Professor Masaru Tomita and his team of researchers at Keio University, Japan, have developed artificial DNA with encoded information that can be added to the genome of common bacteria. The four characters used in genetic coding (A's, T's, G's and C's) work much like digital data. If coded in a particular way, different character combinations can represent specific letters and symbols which can then be translated to produce music, text, video and other content.

But why use bacteria as a storage method in the first place? Because while books may crumble apart and computers may malfunction, bacterial information will last for millions of years -  as long, in fact,  as the species stays alive. Genetic coding is so massive that information can be stashed away somewhere in the gene without affecting an organism's overall appearance and other traits.

And forget about a zip drive or usb plug. According to researchers, up to 100 bits of data can be attached to each organism. Additionally, bacteria can create new copies of the data every time it reproduces itself, as well as insert itself into different places in the genome, essentially "saving" and "backing up" the code.

Recently, scientists successfully inserted Einstein's equation "e=mc2" and the year he published the theory, "1905" into a common soil bacteria.  Of course, in order to translate bacterial code, it must first be solved - a tricky feat for the average untrained eye. But scientists like Tomita are delighted to imagine a day when a species of superior intelligence will read the code as easily as a primer.

In the meantime, scientists are happy to find more practical and mainstream solutions for this method of storage. Some pharmaceutical companies are already interested in entering this brave new world to utilize the code for tracking authentic medicines versus artificial knock-offs.

Posted by Alison Kentta

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18702604/

Comments

[Tom Hines]

Surely you don't believe this, right?

[Dave]

"And forget about a zip drive or usb plug. According to researchers, up to 100 bits of data can be attached to each organism."

You make it sound like 100 bits is a lot. Wouldn't that be 12.5 bytes, which is the same as 12 and a half letters in ASCII?

And if you're going for long term survival, wouldn't you have to place the same data in all the organisms, or at least a significant portion, otherwise it'd be bred out...?

[James Taylor]

Tom, its a widely researched field. Even at my somewhat backwater university there is a research group dedicated to basic development.

So yes.

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

what about mutation ? If the DNA mutates, anything stored therein will be transformed into prune - whip yogurt, from Shakespeare to Samuel Clemens to the Dao De Jing to sensitive government or global data.

Potentially befouled by UV radiation or X - rays.
Nothing is fool - proof.

[Larry MacCaskill]

Alison, did you perhaps inadvertently drop an important word like "million" from that sentence "...up to 100 bits of data can be attached..."?
That's it? A hundred bits sound pitifully small. Would there be some point to sending a whopping nine character message ("e=mC2 1905" -- OK, ten if you count the space) to future civilizations? Seems like if we can't pass on major themes, our histories perhaps, it'd be a mere curiosity. Of course just a "We were here" could be fascinating, I suppose.
I was wondering just a couple days ago after reading the write-up on "CIA's Kryptos", if this very method might not already have been used on this planet. Perhaps in the dim, distant past when the dominant life forms were arthropods, there were vast sprawling hive intelligences or more likely, something we've never imagined, leaving no fossils that we could recognize as important, that rose above the needs of mere survival, became self-aware (does 'intelligence' require awareness?) and understanding that 'all glory is fleeting', wanted to leave an enduring "Killroy was here".
Perhaps as we unravel genetic codes we should be looking at them with cryptanalysis techniques, too. We might be in for a surprise.