Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash
On a nearly still and moonlit night last week, some 75 people formed a circle on Asilomar State Beach around a sand pit ringed by seaweed. Four dancers swayed around the pit to the sound...
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You might call it the smallest movie ever made.
This week, a team of scientists report that they have successfully embedded a short film into the DNA of living bacteria cells.
The mini-movie, really a GIF, is a five-frame animation of a galloping thoroughbred mare named Annie G. The images were taken by the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1800s for his photo series titled “Human and Animal Locomotion.”
“The horse was one of the first examples of a moving image and very recognizable,” said Seth Shipman, a postdoctoral fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School who led the work. “We liked that about it, but we didn’t spend a ton of time thinking about it. We weren’t sure how the research would go.”
Scientists had already shown that a great deal of information can be encoded and stored in synthesized DNA. For example, Shipman’s boss, George Church, a molecular chemist and engineer at Harvard, once converted an entire book into a strand of genetic code.
“DNA has a lot of properties that are good for archival...