(May 26, 2015) Researchers have for the first time succeeded
in recording a binary code on a synthetic polymer. Inspired by the capacity of
DNA to retain an enormous amount of genetic information, a team from the
Institut Charles Sadron de Strasbourg (CNRS) and the Institut de chimie
radicalaire (CNRS/Aix Marseille Université) synthesized and read a multi-bit
message on an artificial polymer. The results were published in Nature
Communications on May 26, 2015
With its 3.4 billion base pairs,
human DNA can compile a tremendous amount of information in a tiny
space. All of the information
stored is expressed using four nitrogenous bases: A, T, G and C. Researchers
had previously been able to use the sequencing of these veritable molecular
building blocks to reproduce a binary code. However, the technical limits of
DNA made it necessary to develop the first synthetic polymer — cheaper, more
malleable and able to store binary information. This has now been achieved for
the first time by a team of French scientists from the CNRS and Aix-Marseille
Université.
Instead of using the four
nitrogenous bases of DNA, in this study the researchers used three monomers Two
of these monomers represent the binary code numbers 0 and 1, and can be used
interchangeably during synthesis. A third nitroxide monomer was inserted
between the bits in order to facilitate the writing and reading of the coded
sequence.