Cold hard storage capacity like that is great, but what if that kind of power could be integrated with something more alive — something like a single cell, or for that matter, integrated into every cell.
Researchers at MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center have just succeeded writing multiple analog streams of real-time environmental data into the genetically transformed hardware of a distributed population of bacterial cells. Living, breathing computers like this are a tremendous advance over the simple encoding of arbitrary digital data with DNA microchips.
Researchers at the University of Aveiro in Portugal are developing DNA barcode tags that can be harmlessly applied to a wide variety of products, even foods or liquids. Each tag is a unique combination of DNA base pairs that attach to most surfaces, and can later be collected, amplified, and sequenced, to reveal the history of the object they mark.
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