Scientists in New York made a unique discovery: people can be trained like in the 'Matrix'

Remember how Neo was taught martial arts in The Matrix? A couple of seconds in a chair with his head connected to some car and his surprised and delighted phrase: "I know kung fu!" This zthe famous scene may not be so far from reality as it seemed to us all at the time of the release of the picture 22 years ago, writes with the BBC.

УScientists at Columbia University in New York have developed technology that allows information to be copied from any digital medium directly into DNA, effectively turning the cells of living organisms into miniature devices for recording and storing data.

Of course, it is not yet possible to study martial arts in this way, but the new technology has many other possible applications.

For example, if you load a computer code into the DNA of an E. coli, it will not affect its ability to reproduce in any way. This means that such “revived programs” can in the most natural way endlessly stamp their own copies in a Petri dish, continuously updating the code encrypted in them.

In other words, to store the necessary information in an almost unchanged form for thousands of years. Brrr !! Immediately I remembered another movie ... "Transcendence" with Johnny Depp.

So far, the new technology is much inferior to other, usual methods of data storage - both in speed and in the volume of recording devices. However, according to scientists, it is reliably protected from errors, because the system for recording genetic information is - without any exaggeration - as old as life itself.

How it works

DNA assembly technology itself is not new. There are only four nitrogenous bases that make up the genetic code. In the laboratory, they can be assembled in a chain, stringing one after the other, like beads, in any order.

This is done using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, better known as genetic scissors. It was developed eight years ago and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year.

However, assembling the genetic code at the molecular level is painstaking work: it requires a lot of time and special equipment. In any case, it was so until recently, when a group of scientists from Columbia University was unable to automate this process.

“We managed to teach cells to talk to a computer through electronic signals and thus download information from any electronic medium,” explained the lead author research, Professor of Systems Biology Harris Wong.

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The experiments were carried out in his laboratory using E. coli. This bacterium is so well studied that microbiologists often use its cells in their experiments and experiments.

However, CRISPR is also great for editing the human genome. So, one can hope that in the future information can be copied from a computer directly into people's cells.

“We translate the binary code of a computer program (a set of zeros and ones) into electrical impulses, which we send into the cell,” explains the inventor. “There are receptors on its surface that perceive these signals and already translate them into the language of DNA, automatically building the required genome sequence.”

As a result, an additional fragment is added to the main DNA strand - a kind of "information trailer". Unlike digital computer information, it is a set of letters of the genetic code (that is, an analog cipher), so the scientist compares this segment with a magnetic tape.

The information hardwired into the DNA of the bacteria becomes part of its genome and is automatically copied with each division.

“This means that later, after reading this sequence, we will be able to recover and recreate the information stored in the cell population,” the professor says.

Huge prospects

So far, the recording of information into cells is rather slow.

To record one bit of information, electrical signals were sent to the cell for 14 hours. During the experiment, which lasted 42 hours, scientists managed to write only three bits of information into DNA. Reverse decryption can also take time, that is, bacteria are still far from the speed of a regular flash drive.

Professor Wong says that in the laboratory the process was slowed down on purpose, and the density of information recording in DNA format could theoretically be even higher than existing technologies allow. Not to mention the fact that cell construction is hardly inferior in speed to digital recording.

“Computer operation times are measured in milliseconds, but some cellular enzymes can work just as quickly,” he says. - Perhaps in the future we will be able to develop some kind of intracellular mechanisms that will greatly speed up the process. In theory, nothing prevents you from creating a cell that will completely copy its genome in a few minutes. ”

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But the value of this technology is not so much in speed as in survivability and, in fact, the ability to store information forever.

“In DNA, information is recorded in three-dimensional analog form, and this is the most stable form. In this form, data can be stored for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, ”he assures.

Already today it is sometimes not so easy to find a way to read data from a laser disk or magnetic tape, not to mention punched cards.

All these carriers are short-lived, and any technologies quickly become obsolete, the professor reminds. But the genetic code does not care about this problem.

“We know that in 50 thousand years we will be able to decipher DNA in exactly the same way as we do it today,” says Harris Wong. - What other form of registration is capable of such?

Professor Wong does not argue that the technology is still in the very early stages of development. Ideally, it is necessary to somehow automate the reverse process: to make it so that the cell can not only copy and save information, but also independently transfer it somewhere. Only then will she learn to fully “talk to the computer” - not only listen, but also respond.

However, before that, the developer admits, it is still very, very far away. Nature has invented a lot of ways to create and change the genetic code, and scientists are just beginning to master them.

“We are not gods,” the professor smiles. “We only use DNA to record information. So we are rather artists, or writers, or programmers - we create genetic programs with some new useful functionality from ready-made elements. "

The next step, he said, is to simplify the way information is transferred from the computer to the cell. Now it uses a stream of electrons, but in the future it can be replaced by something else. For example, an alternating magnetic field or ambient temperature. Or even an ordinary ray of light - after all, most living organisms have photoreceptors.

Then, the professor dreams, it will be possible to copy information into DNA much faster - after all, it will be possible to record simultaneously at several frequencies at once.