This episode of Uno Dos of Trace was graciously
supported by Curiosity Stream.
DNA is incredible.
You exist because of this mix of four chemicals,
adenine and guanine, cytosine and thymine.
And they pair off, and they create instructions for life.
But why four?
And why these four?
And where do these come from?
And what if there are more than four?
And you saw the title, so you actually
know the answer to that one.
But still, I have questions.
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You're not made up of ones and zeros.
But you could argue ones and zeros and twos and threes,
right, ATCG?
Our DNA contains three billion individual letters,
the representations of those four chemicals.
If you split those into groups of 240 characters,
that equals 145 days of tweeting every second, 12
and 1/2 million tweets per person.
There are billions and billions of combinations of these base
pairs.
A study of exome variability found
thousands of different variables were possible.
And in fact, there are many billions
of humans that have ever existed.
And so far, we don't seem to have seen the same one twice.
So DNA is the information code that gives us life.
But what if it could hold the content of our life too?
Images, videos, books, words, memories, calendars, you know,
everything-- if we can encode data
into DNA, which we can, then we could
use DNA to store information just like computers.
We can do this.
It's been covered a lot, even by me.
But as powerful as the four base DNA is--
I mean, look, it made this, after all, you know, and you--
it goes deeper.
What if four letters was just the beginning?
Why not 6 or 8 or 10 or 12?
In the mid 1980s, some scientists
started to think about DNA in this exact way.
And just recently, they finally managed
to make their invention work.
That's right.
They invented new DNA.
The result of more than 30 years of research
is a new eight-base DNA.
They've got the GA.
They've got the TC.
But they've also got two synthetic base pairs, BS
and PZ.
Funnily enough, when you put it all together,
it still makes a double helix.
This new base pair set mimics the structure
of the natural bases.
And this eight-base DNA functions just the same,
just with more code.
They call it hachimoji, Japanese hach for eight
and imoji for letter.
Hachimoji behaves the same as regular DNA.
They even created other companion molecules,
RNA that would work alongside it--
they used a virus to make that--
some synthetic enzymes created using bacteria.
And they put together genes out of those base pairs.
Synthetic proteins were created to then work
with the synthetic genes that they created
using the synthetic base pairs.
Then they needed to read and write from the new hachimoji.
So the RNA that was created from a virus was used.
And they put into a test tube the enzymes
and the RNA and the hachimoji as well as a fluorescent molecule
that when bonded with the RNA would glow green.
When they mixed them all in the test tube, it glowed.
And they knew it worked, an eight-base DNA set,
double the number of base pairs in human
and everyone's DNA, everything's DNA.
Now, I don't know if you're as excited as I am, because you're
probably hearing that word synthetic and thinking,
oh, well, that's not real.
Synthetic doesn't mean not real.
It just means that they didn't evolve naturally on Earth.
What if these hachimoji evolved elsewhere?
Because we've just proved through this research
that they could work.
They could create life codes somehow,
somewhere in the universe.
Aliens potentially could have evolved with eight DNA
bases, four base pairs.
And that DNA could encode way more
information in the same space and still
potentially create life.
NASA is super interested in this possibility.
But before we get off track too much,
the main thing that this is going to be used for
is to store data.
Hard drives will eventually fail.
CDs actually rot after a long enough time.
Solid state drives have limited numbers of read-writes.
But DNA, a study from 2015 found that if left in these Svalbara
Seed Vault at 10 degrees Celsius,
it could last 2,000 years with data it.
I've been there.
IDC, a marketing firm, worked with Seagate, a data storage
company, and they determined that by 2025, humans
are going to have 175 zetabytes of data that we've created
and have to store.
According to New Scientist, one gram of DNA
could hold 455 exabytes.
Now, to put that in perspective, a billion gigabytes,
one exabyte.
1,000 exabytes, one zetabyte, and humans,
again, will have created 175 zetabytes by 2025.
So I went online, and I was looking for how much DNA
is in our bodies.
And someone actually did the math.
About 250 grams is the estimate.
So if a gram of DNA can hold huge amounts of data,
then our bodies, or the amount of DNA in our bodies,
could outstrip the data needs of our whole planet
for sure, especially if we make it out of eight bases.
So just to kind of recap--
a team of scientists spent decades
creating new eight-base DNA.
This new DNA works just like ours, and it mimics life.
But it isn't alive.
We can't use it to make life, but we
can use it to learn about ourselves, to better understand
how our own programming works, use it for more data storage,
use it to understand possible life
in the rest of the universe.
Wow, that's amazing.
So next time you're staring at your body thinking
about how much data your fingertip might
be able to store, if you're like me,
or if you're even more imaginative,
picturing your DNA with eight bases,
just think about it for a bit.
Because it's possible.
And now you know.
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