3D-Printed Bunny – With DNA!

Every living being carriers DNA inside its cells. DNA carries all the necessary information needed to build and even repair it. Now we can store data in DNA almost indefinitely.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

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Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) in cooperation with their Israeli colleagues showcased a technology of storing any data in DNA and then mixing it with construction material. To present the technology to the public they created a short video in which they demonstrate the construction of a plastic bunny in an ordinary 3D-printer. The trick lies in the fact that the printing material includes synthetic DNA that has the building plans for the bunny inside them.

After the printer finished printing the study authors cut off a piece of its plastic body, dissolved it in a beaker and put it into a device for analyzing DNA.

A DNA molecule is made from four basic chemical molecules – adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. Depending on how you combine the four substances you can encode any information – similarly to how ones and zeroes create digital information in the world of computers.

So, the scientists created synthetic DNA into which they encoded vector plans of the 3D model of the bunny and then mixed it in with the printing material. And to showcase that they can not only encode but also decode the information they separated the synthetic DNA from the dissolved piece of the rabbit, read it, decoded the plans are printed another copy of the bunny based on the DNA-plans. And they did it several times in a row without having the information degrade in subsequent “generations”.

Obviously, at the moment it a purely experimental, time-consuming and thus quite an expensive process to write and read data – but once, maybe in just a few dozen years, a new generation of specialized storage devices could be based on the technology. Each storage unit would have the data stored in a way that it could be recreated even from a piece of the unit creating close to indestructible storage.

Scientists from ETH aren't the only ones playing with storing data into synthetic DNA. Even Microsoft and other technological companies are experimenting with it. The reason why they are doing so is because DNA has incredible potential information storage density. Just a gram of DNA is theoretically capable of storing almost a zettabyte of information. That is a billion terabytes.

Sources:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0356-z

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