Manufacturing tiny plastic bunnies with a 3D printer isn’t anything new. But the toys described in a new Nature Biotechnology paper have an unexpected twist — the bunnies contain the very information needed to make more of them.
Produced from a partnership between Israeli and Swiss labs, the figurines encase synthetic DNA that holds the code required to 3D print more bunnies. In further tests, they were able to extract the computer code and “reproduce” the bunnies, the researchers write. It's a proof-of-concept that showcases DNA's potential as a
As the world produces more data, we’ll also need increasingly denser places to put it all. Artificial DNA, researchers learned, could be tweaked to carry computer code representing all that data, whether it be YouTube videos or instructions for 3D printing a plastic bunny. DNA could theoretically carry an exabyte of data (a billion gigabytes) in
Previous efforts have used DNA ...
