Forget iTunes or your old zipper case of DVDs. How about storing movies in a Petri dish of E. coli?
Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have stored a short video in the DNA of bacteria and then retrieved it. It’s the first time a video has been recorded into living cells, and the development could have environmental applications.
“DNA is a great place to store information. Biology uses it quite effectively,” said Seth Shipman, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study. “It’s compact, and it’s incredibly stable.”
Shipman and his colleagues encoded Eadweard Muybridge’s “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop,” otherwise known as “The Horse in Motion,” one of the earliest series of moving images ever created.