GIF in a Gene!

Here's something fascinating I learnt today!

Back in 2017 Harvard researchers embedded a short animated gif into the bacterial dna of E.coli with the help of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool.

To achieve this they first converted the GIF to pixels and then they encoded the pixels to Nucleotides, with each pixel assigned a specific DNA nucleotide, Adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanin.

And with some magic the encoded message was inserted into the bacteria's DNA. Furthermore, they later retrieved the information and hence the original gif! You can click here to see the original gif and the one that was extracted. Essentially identical to the human eye!

In the same experiment they also encoded an image of a human hand into the bacterial DNA:

source

Btw, if you saw the gif I linked above then it might remind you of something. Or not. Yet it's quite iconic as it's essentially the first movie ever made known as "The Horse in Motion", shot in 1878:

The Horse in Motion is a series of cabinet cards by Eadweard Muybridge, including six cards that each show a sequential series of six to twelve "automatic electro-photographs" depicting the movement of a horse. source

Supposedly this achievement has implications in DNA-based storage devices but I doubt we will see any mainstream applications any time soon.

Anyways, cool stuff :D

References & Further Reading

• Nature
• Wired

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