researcher have developed what is being nickname as abiological “ tape measure ” recorder . By engineering bacterium the team was able to make the organisms record sealed environmental events in their deoxyribonucleic acid , even figuring out a means to make them “ time - stamp ” them , provide scientists not only to work out what , but also when something pass off .
“ Such bacteria , swallowed by a patient , might be able to record the changes they experience through the whole digestive piece of ground , yielding an unprecedented view of previously inaccessible phenomena,”explainedColumbia University Medical Center ’s Harris Wang , a senior author of this latest work published inScience .
The development is based on pirate the bacteria’sown resistant system , specifically the CRISPR - Cas complex . This is the same scheme that has revolutionize genetic redaction in the retiring decennary , as it takes snippets of desoxyribonucleic acid from whichever virus the bacterium showdown , and precisely infix them into its own genome in chronological social club .
This means that if that bacteria , or the strain to which it belongs , was to come across the same computer virus at some point in the future tense , it efficaciously has a library that it can reference , and can tell the resistant organisation how best to harness it . While other team have figured out how to co - opt this to insert trust gene into everything from yeast to humanity , the grouping behind this latest enquiry instead saw hope in its power to work a act like a memory board .
“ When you think about enter temporally alter signals with electronics , or an audio transcription … that ’s a very hefty technology , but we were think how can you scale this to living cells themselves ? ” read alum student Ravi Sheth , a co - writer of the newspaper .
The team was able-bodied to alter the niggling circles of DNA find in bacteria , called plasmids , to record the time and events . They edit one to make copies of itself when it detected certain extraneous stimuli , like particular metabolites produced by specific bacteria , while a disjoined plasmid marked the time by continually adding spacers into its genome . This mean that when the bacterium has been exposed to the correct stimulus , the signaling will disrupt the prison term - continue spacer signal , and denote when this took topographic point .
So far the experiment have shown that the alter bacterium can record at least three different external signal while keeping racecourse of the metre for days on end . The Leslie Townes Hope is that this can be further down to work within the human body or even to record pollutants in the environment .
