CRISPR Encodes Movie into Bacteria system:
CRISPR Encodes Movie into Bacteria system-based technology enables the recording of digital data, like those presenting successive frames of the movie of a galloping horse, one of the first made ever, in a population of living bacteria. In the future, this molecular recording device could allow researchers to have cells record the key changes they undergo during their development or exposure to environmental or pathogenic signals. [Wyss Institute at Harvard University]
Coming soon to a petri dish near you: recordings of dramas that are as compelling as any that would reveal the mysteries of the human heart, only more intimate. When played back, these recordings promise to reveal the events that matter to cells—the molecular experiences that drive development, host-pathogen interactions, pathogenic processes, and much, much more.
A team of scientists has released a trailer based at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School. How DNA can encode in and then play back from DNA in living cells. It’s a concept movie brief proof, a sequence of images that illustrates.
How do turn cells into historians?
“We want to turn cells into historians,” explained neuroscientist Seth Shipman, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. “We envision a biological memory system that’s much smaller and more versatile than today’s technologies, which will track many events non-intrusively over time.”
The ability to record such sequential events as a movie at the molecular level is key to the idea of reinventing the very concept of recording using molecular engineering, say the researchers. In this scheme, cells can induce to record molecular events—such as changes in gene expression over time—in their own genomes.
Details about producing cell-level blockbusters appeared July 12 in the journal Nature, in an article entitled “CRISPR–Cas Encoding of a Digital Movie into the Genomes of a Population of Living Bacteria.”
CRISPR helps bacteria to develop immunity against the constant onslaught of viruses in their different environments. As a memory of survived infections, it captures viral DNA molecules and generates short so-called spacer sequences from them that are added as new elements upstream of previous elements in a growing array located in the CRISPR locus of bacterial genomes. The by-now famous CRISPR/Cas9 protein constantly resorts to this memory to destroy the same viruses when they return.
More information: https://www.genengnews.com/topics/genome-editing/crispr-encodes-movie-into-bacteria-then-dna-sequencing-plays-it/
