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Researchers at MIT have engineered Escherichia coli and human cells such that they can record multiple molecular events as well as the time and order in which they happen. The approach, which they describe in Molecular Cell today (August 22), incorporates base editing technology and essentially exploits DNA’s coding capacity for the storage, retrieval, and processing of specific user-defined information.
“This is a very clever use of base editing for reading [and] writing information inside of living cells,” biological engineer Randall Platt of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich writes in an email to The Scientist. “Their system seems robust and powerful and will open up doors for applications in DNA writing such as molecular recording and synthetic biology more generally.”
Turning cells into molecular recorders—meaning they are genetically programmed to make permanent alterations in their DNA in response to particular molecular events—has a number ...
