Inspired by “Jurassic Park,” MIT researchers have created a glassy, amber-like polymer to store DNA at room temperature. This marks a significant advance in DNA storage technology because this technique is cheaper and safer than other methods. We’re not talking about just genomes either — DNA can be used to store books, films, or even the sum of all human knowledge, making it a fantastic medium for archiving.
DNA Storage with a Jurassic Park Theme
MIT scientists demonstrated their work by encoding the “Jurassic Park” theme music and a complete human genome in the polymer. They easily extracted the DNA without any damage.
In the movie “Jurassic Park”, there’s an iconic scene where Dr. John Hammond and his team reveal a piece of amber containing a perfectly preserved mosquito. This mosquito, trapped in resin millions of years ago, had once bitten a dinosaur. So it contained dinosaur blood in its body. Hammond and his team extracted DNA by drilling into the amber, which became the foundation for their cloning process that brought dinosaurs back to life.
While amber can remarkably preserve the physical structures of organisms, such as insects, in great detail over millions of years, the preservation of DNA is a much more complex and delicate matter. DNA degrades over time due to various environmental factors like radiation, temperature changes, and chemical reactions. Studies have shown that DNA can typically survive only for several thousand years, although much older DNA has been found. This includes the oldest DNA sample discovered thus far — two-million-year-old DNA locked in sediment in a region called Peary Land at the farthest northern reaches of Greenland. And before this, the oldest DNA ever recovered came from a million-year-old mammoth tooth.
Although the Jurassic Park amber-to-DNA-to-dinosaur-clones is exceedingly unrealistic, the scene partly inspired the new effort at MIT. What if you could make an amber-like material that shields DNA against environmental damage, prolonging its shelf life virtually indefinitely? It’s from this key question that the study sprung up — and it has turned out quite successful.
From Jurassic Park to Real-World Applications
Current methods for storing DNA rely on freezing temperatures, which consume substantial energy and are impractical in many regions. The new polymer, however, preserves DNA at room temperature, protecting it from heat and moisture damage.
“Freezing DNA is the number one way to preserve it, but it’s very expensive, and it’s not scalable,” James Banal, a former MIT postdoc, said a in press release. “I think our new preservation method is going to be a technology that may drive the future of storing digital information on DNA.”
DNA is stable and capable of storing large amounts of information. It can encode digital data using the four nucleotides in genetic code: A, T, G, and C. This high-density storage method could theoretically hold all the world’s data in a mug-sized amount of DNA.
Previous efforts, such as storing DNA in silica particles, were time-consuming and hazardous. To improve this, MIT researchers developed a degradable thermoset polymer. This polymer, made from styrene and a cross-linker, forms a solid that protects DNA. It is hydrophobic, preventing moisture damage, and degrades controllably with specific bonds.
Since DNA is hydrophilic (attracted to water) and the polymer is hydrophobic, the researchers had to develop a method to incorporate DNA into the material. They identified a combination of three special monomers that dissolve DNA and facilitate its interaction with the polymer.
The team, led by Banal and chemistry professor Jeremiah Johnson, named this process Thermoset-REinforced Xeropreservation (or T-REX). This method embeds DNA in the polymer within hours and can be optimized further for even faster turnaround times.
To retrieve the DNA, they used a molecule called cysteamine to cleave the bonds and a detergent to release the DNA without damage.
This polymer protects DNA at temperatures up to 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers successfully encapsulated DNA of varying lengths, from short sequences to entire human genomes. Notably, the retrieved DNA exhibited no errors.
The researchers envision this technology changing the landscape of long-term digital information storage and personalized medicine. By storing genomes for future analysis, they hope to preserve critical biological data as technology evolves.
“The idea is, why don’t we preserve the master record of life forever?” Banal says. “Ten years or 20 years from now, when technology has advanced way more than we could ever imagine today, we could learn more and more things. We’re still in the very infancy of understanding the genome and how it relates to disease.”
The findings appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
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