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IO Coli (Information Storage)

Abstract

Can we make E. coli that stores information? What about E. coli that reads from or writes to the DNA of another E. coli?

There are several papers that suggest using DNA for information storage. The problem is that the methods for reading and writing the DNA involve things like molecular cloning. While this is okay if you want to store data in a single cell, it has problems if you want to copy data from cell to cell. We might be able to use environmental signals (chemical, light, etc.) to transmit data to a cell, but this is difficult and affects the other cells.

Nikolas suggested using a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrovirus retrovirus] to copy information into an E. coli cell. This is called a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector viral vector] and it works, but it only infects a single cell. Can we create E. coli to read DNA from a cell and write it to another? Even E. coli that can write to the DNA of another cell would be an achievement.

Proposal

?

References

• The Davidson 2006 team was able to shuffle DNA units in vivo [http://openwetware.org/wiki/Davidson:Davidson_iGEM_2006].
• The MIT 2008 team has also been thinking about DNA storage [http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM:MIT/2008/Brainstorming#Information_Storage_Device].

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