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Tough microbe's DNA could be a lasting archive - Science Magazine

Summary

Joe Davis is looking for the ultimate time capsule. He wants to preserve a record of humanity that could survive for eons, to be read by successors to Homo sapiens on Earth or by sapient extraterrestrials. He has now found the right medium, he thinks: the DNA of an odd microbe that lives in deposits of rock salt. He believes this digital record—protected by salt and renewed by the microbe—could possibly survive for hundreds of millions of years. It's a visionary idea, owing as much to art as science. Davis, an artist affiliated with a Harvard University biology lab, bridges both worlds. His project took a step forward last week with a study posted on bioRxiv, a preprint repository. In the study, Davis and his colleagues show they can encode information in the DNA of Halobacterium salinarum—a hard-to-kill, salt-tolerant microbe that has, on average, 25 backup copies of each of its chromosomes. Other researchers have explored the archival potential of DNA, which packs the equivalent of about 300 megabytes of data into the nucleus of a human cell. But Davis is combining that capacity with the resilience of an extraordinarily hardy organism.

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Tough microbe's DNA could be a lasting archive - Science Magazine
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