Harvard University launched an experiment without the designated deadline, as it potentially measured in thousands of years. The author of idea – artist and philosopher Joe Davis, who believes that he found the perfect candidate for the role of perpetual media. He wrote in the DNA of the microbe Halobacterium salinarum two sets of information, the preservation of which will test for several years, to ensure stability of the carrier.
Davis’s idea is not new, experiments with the preservation of arbitrary amounts of information in the DNA of different organisms has already taken place in the past. But every time scientists came to a standstill – life is changeable by nature, in the DNA molecule accumulate errors, mutations occur and data integrity to ensure comes out. And microbe Halobacterium salinarum has adapted to life in extremely salty solutions, gives such a chance.
Halobacterium salinarum is present in all organisms that not only survive in a salty environment, and falls into a kind of suspended animation. While the salinity decreases, and does not appear nutrients, it stops its vital functions. At this time DNA is replicated microbe with extremely low frequency, the conditions for the emergence of mutations do not exist, and the information in the molecule may remain intact for a very long time. It has been confirmed experimentally.
Scientists still know too little about the metabolism of archaea to design ready memory card based on them. It takes years of observations and analysis, and for the first project was chosen elements of the Russian folk tale of Koschei the deathless – 3D model in the form of needles and eggs, which are recorded in the DNA of the microbe. Samples of microbes-media scientists put in salt and periodically rechecking the security of the data.
Source bioRxiv.org
