viral data storage: harvard scientists encode a movie in bacterial DNA

viral data storage: harvard scientists are trying to find new ways to store our data, as usage grows substantially every day, and they have just revealed a movie that is …literally viral. consisting of just five frames, this movie has been encoded into bacterial DNA and it could revolutionize the digital world. to do so, they have taken eadweard muybridge’s ‘horse in motion’—one of the first animated stop-motion films ever made—and instead of capturing it on photographic plates, it is now set within DNA.

although scientists already knew that they can encode large amounts of information and synthesize it into DNA strands, the study published in harvard’s nature journal shows that it can also be recorded in an specific order. that’s why it was perfect to use muybridge’s galloping sequence. to start, the researchers broke each frame of the film into a 36×26 pixel grid. they continued by using the A, C, T and G nucleotides—which are building blocks of DNA. after that, they added a code to indicate the position of each pixel inside the frame. once the pieces were in place, the scientists used CRISPR—a gene editing system—to insert the codes into the bacteria’s genome. the results were a playable movie with 90% accuracy.

viral data storage at harvard
‘we designed strategies that essentially translate the digital information contained in each pixel of an image or frame as well as the frame number into a DNA code, that, with additional sequences, is incorporated into spacers. each frame thus becomes a collections of spacers,’ says seth shipman, wyss institute and harvard medical school researcher. ‘we then provided spacer collections for consecutive frames chronologically to a population of bacteria which, using Cas1/Cas2 activity, added them to the CRISPR arrays in their genomes. and after retrieving all arrays again from the bacterial population by DNA sequencing, we finally were able to reconstruct all frames of the galloping course movie and the order they appeared in.’