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25

24

January/February 2018^ DISCOVER^33

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: CLAUS LUNAU/SCIENCE SOURCE; EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; SETH SHIPMAN

CRISPR Goes to the Movies

❯

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE’S

“The Horse in Motion” was

an early demonstration

of stop-motion illustration. In

keeping with his pioneering spirit,

Harvard University researchers have

re-created the images by storing

data in living bacteria. The results

were published in Nature in July.

Geneticist Seth Shipman and

his team translated the pixels of

Muybridge’s moving picture into

a code made from the As, Ts, Gs,

and Cs of DNA. Then, using the

CRISPR-Cas gene-editing tool, they

spliced sequences corresponding

to individual video pixels into the

genome. The bacteria strung these

snippets together in order and

stored them in its DNA, letting

scientists replay the video.

Now that they’ve shown

it’s possible to encode

and retrieve information

sequentially in bacteria,

Shipman hopes to create

“molecular recorders” — genetically

engineered cells with a time log of

their activities. These recorders could

someday monitor cellular activities

in our bodies — like an airplane’s

black box — giving scientists insights

into what cells are doing and when.

— CARL ENGELKING

Age Is Just a Number

(of Neural Stem Cells)

❯

SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE IDENTIFIED how to

slow or even reverse our biological clock. Adult

neural stem cells in the hypothalamus — a brain

region that regulates hunger, sleep, body temperature

and other activities — appear to orchestrate

the body’s aging process, they found.

Research on lab animals has shown

that the number of hypothalamus

stem cells diminishes with age. To

determine if this cell loss was

related to aging, scientists killed

off hypothalamic stem cells in

middle-aged mice, according to a

study that appeared in July in Nature.

The mice showed clear signs of aging,

such as loss of memory, endurance

and coordination.

The scientists also discovered that the stem cells

released tiny packets of microRNA, bits of genetic

material that control how genes function. They injected

the mRNA into the middle-aged mice that were missing

hypothalamic stem cells and into healthy

mice of similar age. In both groups,

the treatment slowed aging.

The findings could lead

to better methods of

treating age-related maladies

and prolonging life, says lead

author Dongsheng Cai of

the Albert Einstein College

of Medicine. “But it will take

some time to translate this

into humans,” he says.

— LINDA MARSA

Researchers

encoded the

series “The Horse

in Motion” (right)

and stored the

data in a bacterial

genome for later

replay (left).

Hypothalamus