I saw on the science instagram that Harvard scientists were able to encode a video of a horse running onto DNA that was put inside a living bacteria. Then they retrieved said video at 90% accuracy. What does this mean and how is this possible?
In: Biology
DNA is made up of 4 chemicals (cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A] or thymine [T]) and a bit of other stuff. A strand of human DNA will contain many millions (or hundreds of millions) of these.
Since DNA can be represented in each position by one of four things, each is the equivalent of two binary bits. For example, you could say that C=00, G=01, A=10, and T=11. So you can encode a binary string by breaking it up into pairs of bits and encoding each as one of the four chemicals in DNA.
For example, the binary string 0110100001100101011011000110110001101111 is the ASCII representation for “hello”. In my example, you’d parse that as
01 10 10 00 01 10 01 01 01 10 11 00 01 10 11 00 01 10 11 11. Using the encoding I described, that would be GAACGAGGGATCGATCATT (if I didn’t screw that up).
So you create a DNA strand with that sequence and it contains the information for “hello” if you decode it using the same scheme as the one you used to encode it.
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