Data storage in bacteria breaks new ground

Data storage in bacteria breaks new ground

20th February 2011, Comments 0 comments

A group of students at Hong Kong's Chinese University are making strides towards storing vast amounts of data in an unexpected home: the E.coli bacterium.

Hong Kong -- The US' national archives occupy more than 500 miles (800 kilometres) of shelving; France's archives stretch for more than 100 miles of shelves, as do Britain's.


"This means you will be able to keep large datasets for the long term in a box of bacteria in the refrigerator," said Aldrin Yim, a student instructor on the university's biostorage project, a 2010 gold medallist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s prestigious iGEM competition.


China, Hong Kong : Biochemistry students from the School of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) from L-R Marco Lim, Jacky Loo, Cathy Mak and Vivien Chiu pose for a picture in Hong Kong on 28 December 2010



But the Hong Kong researchers have leapt beyond this early step, developing methods to store more complex data and starting to overcome practical problems which have lent weight to sceptics who see the method as science fiction.

The group has developed a method of compressing data, splitting it into chunks and distributing it among different bacterial cells, which helps to overcome limits on storage capacity. They are also able to "map" the DNA so information can be easily located.



They have also developed a three-tier security fence to encode the data, which may come as welcome news to US diplomats who have seen their thoughts splashed over the Internet thanks to WikiLeaks.



The team have even coined a word for this field -- biocryptography -- and the encoding mechanism contains built-in checks to ensure that mutations in some bacterial cells do not corrupt the data as a whole.


But he said: "What the students did was to try it out and make sure some of the fundamental principles are actually achievable."

The Hong Kong group's work may have a more immediate application.

The techniques they use -- removing DNA from bacterial cells, manipulating them using enzymes and returning them to a new cell -- are similar to those used to create genetically modified foods.

But rather than changing the building blocks of an organism, the Hong Kong group allows extra information to piggyback on the DNA of the cell, after checking their changes against a master database to make sure they do not have accidental toxic effects.

Their work could enable extra information to be added to a genetically modified crop in the form of a "bio barcode", Chan said.

"For example, a company that makes a GM tomato that grows extra large with a gene that promotes growth -- on top of that we can actually encode additional information like safety protocols, things that are not directly related to the biological system."




"The field is getting popular because of the energy crisis, environmental pollution, climate change. They are thinking that a biological system will be a future solution to those -- as alternative energy sources, as a remedy for pollution. For these, micro-organisms are the obvious choice," Chan said.

One type of bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans, can even survive nuclear radiation.



The group dismisses concerns that this could be dangerous, pointing out that despite E.coli's poor reputation, they use an altered form that cannot exist outside a rich synthetic medium.

In fact, says Chan, while safety rules are strict, more measures are taken to protect the bacteria from contamination than to protect the researchers from the bacteria.

However, Yim admitted that while the group's work is a "foundational advance", a petri dish PC is not likely to be on the market in the coming years, not least because the method of retrieving the data requires experts in a laboratory.

"It's possible," he said, "but there's a long way to go."

Judith Evans / AFP / Expatica

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