Taking cells out to the movies with new CRISPR technology

Researchers are developing ways to harness DNA, the blueprint of biological life, as a synthetic raw material to store large amounts of digital information outside of living cells, using expensive machinery. 

But, what if they could coerce living cells, like large populations of bacteria, into using their own genomes as a biological hard drive that can be used to record information and then be tapped for it anytime? Such an approach could not only open entirely new possibilities of data storage, but also be engineered further into an effective memory device that may be able to record the molecular experiences cells are having during their development, or exposure to stresses and pathogens in a chronological fashion.

In 2016, a team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) lead by Wyss Core Faculty member George Church, Ph.D., built the first molecular recorder based on the CRISPR system, which allows cells to acquire bits of chronologically provided, DNA-encoded information to generate a memory of them in the genome of bacteria as a cell model.

The information, stored away as an array of sequences in the CRISPR locus, can be recalled and used to reconstruct a timeline of events. However, "as promising as this was, we did not know what would happen when we tried to track about a hundred sequences at once, or if it would work at all.

Now, in a new study published in Nature, the same team shows in foundational proof-of-principle experiments that the CRISPR system, developed further as a first-of-its-kind approach, is able to encode information as complex as a digitized image of a human hand, reminiscent of some of the first paintings drawn on cave walls by early humans, and a sequence of one of the first motion pictures made ever, that of a galloping horse, in living cells.