Scientists have long been experimenting with the use of synthetic DNA molecules as information carriers. And if the process of synthesizing such DNA does not cause great difficulties, then the process of reading recorded data based on sequencing technology (determining the DNA sequence) is far from perfect. But recently, a group of researchers from France and Japan has developed and created so-called “chemical neurons” that can not only read information from DNA, but also pre-process it and provide the results in a form suitable for later use.
The interest in DNA as an information carrier is due to its huge information capacity, single gram molecules can store about 215 million gigabytes of data. And to record the contents of the entire current Internet, a shoebox-sized device would be required. Moreover, DNA molecules can store the information recorded in them for thousands or even millions of years under suitable conditions.
Researchers from the French research organizations CNRS and ESPCI Paris-PSL, University of Tokyo, have worked on the problem of finding and preprocessing specific information that would eliminate the need to read the entire DNA sequence at the highest level. As a result of these studies, “chemical neurons” were born, consisting of three enzymes that can enter into certain chemical reactions with each other. In fact, these neurons can transmit information in the same way as normal neurons in nervous tissue.
Then a multi-layered structure was created from chemical neurons, a kind of neural network. In this way, chemical neurons became able to process the data contained in DNA molecules in liquid droplets. And the results of this process are broadcast using fluorescent signals that can be easily detected and read using conventional lasers and photo sensors.
If you use this approach in a specialized microfluidic device, you can perform tens of thousands of enzyme reactions simultaneously. In practice, this means mass parallel reading and processing of information contained in DNA, which can be used, for example, when searching huge databases written in DNA.
Source: Port Altele
