Storing Data In Bacteria DNA?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Science, Technology
Yes, organic storage. This has the potential to be huge but there’s still a long, long, long way to go yet.
The four characters that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much like digital data. Character combinations can stand for specific letters and symbols � so codes in genomes can be translated, or read, to produce music, text, video and other content.While ink may fade and computers may crash, bacterial information lasts as long as a species stays alive � possibly a mind-boggling million years � according to Professor Masaru Tomita, who heads the team of researchers at Keio University.
Tomita’s team successfully inserted into a common bacterium Albert Einstein’s famous “E equals MC squared” equation and “1905,” the year the Nobel Prize-winning physicist published the special theory of relativity.
Gives a whole new meaning to a computer virus. Yeah, yeah, I know bacteria and viruses are different, but how long before they figure out a way to store data in viruses too?
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