"Hardware Bugs" Or Using Living Bacteria As A Hard Drive: Stored Data Can Be Passed To Offspring

Scientists Turn Bacteria into Living Hard Drives

Living organisms can store lines of code and pass them down to their progeny.​

William Herkewitz | June 9, 2016

By feeding strings of human-written data into colonies of bacteria, scientists have discovered a way to turn tiny cells into living, squirming hard drives.
A team of Harvard scientists led by geneticists Seth Shipman and Jeff Nivala has just developed a fascinating way to write chunks information into the genetic code of living, growing bacterial cells. It could be the code for a computer program or the lines of a poem. Either way, these living memory sticks can pass this data onto their descendants, and scientists can later read that data by genotyping the bacteria. As Shipman explains in a paper today in the journal Science, his method can upload roughly 100 bytes of data.

"Your next hard drive - bacteria." Source: http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/your_next_hard_drive_bacteria

<more at http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a21268/scientists-turn-bacteria-into-living-hard-drives/; related articles and links: http://futurism.com/harvard-scientists-create-hard-drives-that-are-alive-by-uploading-data-to-living-cells/ (Harvard Scientists Create Hard Drives That Are Alive. June 13, 2016) and http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/your_next_hard_drive_bacteria (Molecular recordings by directed CRISPR spacer acquisition. Seth L. Shipman, Jeff Nivala1, Jeffrey D. Macklis and George M. Church. Science, June 9, Jun 2016. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf1175. [Abstract: The ability to write a stable record of identified molecular events into a specific genomic locus would enable the examination of long cellular histories and have many applications, ranging from developmental biology to synthetic devices. We show that the type I-E CRISPR-Cas system of E. coli can mediate acquisition of defined pieces of synthetic DNA. We harnessed this feature to generate records of specific DNA sequences into a population of bacterial genomes. We then applied directed evolution to alter the recognition of a protospacer adjacent motif by the Cas1-Cas2 complex, which enabled recording in two modes simultaneously. We used this system to reveal aspects of spacer acquisition, fundamental to the CRISPR-Cas adaptation process. These results lay the foundations of a multimodal intracellular recording device.])>