Stanford Scientists Successfully Rewrite DNA

A team of Stanford bioengineers has successfully encoded, stored and erased digital data within the DNA of living cells, according to Stanford Medicine News.

“It took us three years and 750 tries to make it work, but we finally did it,” said Jerome Bonnet, PhD, in an announcement. Their findings appeared Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bonnet is a post-doc scholar at Stanford who worked with graduate student Pakpoom Subsoontorn and assistant professor Drew Endy, PhD, to take natural enzymes adapted from bacteria and reapply them to flip targeted sequences of DNA back and forth on command. This would be analogous to a bit of data—a binary digit—being encoded into living cells.

“Essentially, if the DNA section points in one direction, it’s a zero. If it points the other way, it’s a one,” Subsoontorn said.

“Programmable data storage within the DNA of living cells would seem an incredibly powerful tool for studying cancer, aging, organismal development and even the natural environment,” said Endy.

One practical application could be allowing researchers to count how many times a cell divides, which could in turn allow scientists to turn off cells before they become cancerous.

The researchers’ work is the biological equivalent of non-volatile memory—a computer term referring to memory that can store information without consuming power. The biotech term for this is “recombinase-mediated DNA inversion.”

The device the team invented to perform this act has been dubbed a “recombinase addressable data” module, or RAD.

The researchers used RAD to tweak a piece of DNA in microbes that is responsible for how the one-celled organisms respond to ultraviolet light. By flip that section back and forth, the microbes would glow either red or green.

Their findings appear in the May 21 online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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