Scientists have discovered how to turn bacteria into tiny hard drives by feeding them strings of human-written data, reports Popular Mechanics.
These bacteria can also pass on the data to their descendants, which geneticists can then access later.
While artificially manufactured DNA has existed for decades, the Harvard scientific team wished to see if they could implant this information into a living cell.
“Rather than synthesizing DNA and cutting it into a living cell, we wanted to know if we could use nature’s own methods to write directly onto the genome of a bacterial cell, so it gets copied and pasted into every subsequent generation” said geneticist Seth Shipman.
The team found that as long as you introduce a segment of genetic data that looks like viral DNA to a colony of bacteria, the bacteria would gobble it up and incorporate it into their genetic code.
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I wonder what would happen the day they accidentally inject the wrong kind of code into bacteria and turn it into a super virus?