MIT engineers have transformed the genome of the bacterium E. coli into a long-term storage device for memory. They envision that this stable, erasable, and easy-to-retrieve memory will be well suited for applications such as sensors for environmental and medical monitoring.
«You can store very long-term information,» says Timothy Lu, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering. «You could imagine having this system in a bacterium that lives in your gut, or environmental bacteria. You could put this out for days or months, and then come back later and see what happened at a quantitative level.»
The new strategy, described in the Nov. 13 issue of the journal Science, overcomes several limitations of existing methods for storing memory in bacterial genomes, says Lu, the paper’s senior author. Those methods require a large number of genetic regulatory elements, limiting the amount of information that can be stored.
The earlier efforts are also limited to digital memory, meaning that they can record only all-or-nothing memories, such as whether a particular event occurred. Lu and graduate student Fahim Farzadfard, the paper’s lead author, set out to create a system for storing analog memory, which can reveal how much exposure there was, or how long it lasted. To achieve that, they designed a «genomic tape recorder» that lets researchers write new information into any bacterial DNA sequence.
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The above story is based on materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Anne Trafton. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Aunque existen ciertas técnicas o métodos que incrementan esta posibilidad, ninguna es seguro al 100%. El método más común es el de la temperatura, que consiste en determinar el método exacto de la ovulación mediante mediciones diarias de la temperatura basal de la mujer.
El equipamiento es el de más alta resolución en Cuba y fue donado por la Universidad de Maastricht, de Holanda, y la fundación Atlantic Charitable Trust. Está concebido especialmente para el estudio de la anatomía y el funcionamiento del cerebro. 
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