Bacterial DNA to store image and GIF

Scientists have successfully encoded an image and a short film – a GIF – into a bacteria’s DNA with the help of the genome editing tool CRISPR.

US scientists from Harvard University inserted a picture of a hand and a GIF of five frames of a galloping horse Annie G captured in the late 19th Century by the British photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in the DNA of bacteria E.coli.

Publishing their findings in the journal Nature, in order to confirm that the microbes have integrated the data as expected, the scientists sequenced the bacterial DNA for retrieving the image and the GIF.

For inserting the image the team relocated the image composed of black and white pixels on the building blocks of DNA known as nucleotides, generating a code associated with the individual pixels of each image. Then, with the help of CRISPR, two proteins were used for interpolating genetic code in the target cells of E.coli bacteria via electricity. For inserting the GIF, it took five days to convey the sequences frame-by-frame into the cells. The information was stretched across the genomes of numerous bacteria instead of just one.

The co-author Seth Shipman informed BBC, “The information is not contained in a single cell, so each individual cell may only see certain bits or pieces of the movie. So what we had to do was reconstruct the whole movie from the different pieces.”

For recovering the data, the team sequenced the DNA and made use of custom computer code to decipher the genetic data that effectively reproduced the original image.

The experiment turned out to be almost successful as the team pulled it off with perfectly recreating the hand image while recreating the video with 90% accuracy. Shipman expressed, “We were really happy with how it came out.”

The scientists also further plan to use this method for producing ‘molecular recorders’ that might be able to reveal secrets of brain development. This process makes scientists a step closer to embedding data into human skin some day, stated The Verge.