Reblogged from Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views.
Apart from the occasional mutation, we often think of the information in DNA as static, like a read-only CD-ROM. Epigenetics has overturned this idea, but as ENV noted earlier, some scientists are finding they can make DNA more like a rewritable CD-RW. According to an article in Nature News, “Synthetic biologists have long sought to devise biological data-storage systems because they could be useful in a variety of applications, and because data storage will be a fundamental function of the digital circuits that the field hopes to create in cells.” And they have succeeded in doing just that, as “Researchers have encoded a form of rewritable memory into DNA.” The article explains that after being engineered by biologists, “DNA can be programmed to act as a biological data-storage device” where the DNA “can be erased and encoded with a new memory state, as is done in everyday devices such as personal computers.”