The DNA of things arrives: like living beings, objects can also contain instructions that allow them to be reproduced. To make it possible is the technique described in the journal Nature Biotechnology and developed in the Polytechnic of Zurich in collaboration with the Israeli Erlich Lab. The result is a further step of 3D printing, which allows to insert in the printed objects molecules of DNA with the instructions to carry them out.
"We can integrate 3D printing instructions into an object, so that even after decades or centuries it is possible to recover them," notes the study coordinator, Robert Grass. The idea is to preserve information in a similar way to what happens in living beings, that is coded in molecules of DNA, and the new approach allows to combine two known techniques: the first, to which the Grass group contributed, consists in 'insert the barcode inside glass nanoparticles; the second, developed by the Erlich Lab, allows you to store a huge amount of data in just one gram of DNA.
The tests conducted so far show that it is possible to store information of different types. For example, a plastic rabbit was printed in 3D with instructions for its printing enclosed in a glass nanoparticle: the researchers were able to retrieve the instructions for printing from a fragment of the rabbit and, on that base, they printed five new identical rabbits.
With the same technique a short film was then kept contained in the Warsaw Ghetto archive, contained in a glass nanoparticle inserted into the lenses of a pair of glasses. "It's a nice idea because it uses techniques that are already known in a new way," said Marinella Levi, founder of the first 3D printing laboratory at the Milan Polytechnic. "The DNA - he added - can in fact contain an extreme variety of information. However, the technique has limitations because there are no widespread systems for the extraction and reading of DNA and can only be used with plastics that do not reach high temperatures during production ".