DNA Tech

We we talked about the the history of humans knowing about DNA. We talked about what it is and what it does, where it might come from, where it may come from Mail Night, interesting research that we're learning about DNA in more recent years, and uh, and in ways we can use it for medical purposes. Yeah, And today we wanted to look at other ways we could use

DNA as a technology as a tool. And some of them are ways that you're probably familiar with if you've ever watched any like police procedural type stuff or anything like that. But we've got a lot of other uses, including some pretty mind blowing ones. Actually, I'd say all of these are mind blowing because DNA as a as an English literature major who hasn't had any kind of uh organic chemistry or biology courses in a very long time, this is all fascinating and terrifying to me because they're

a long molecules. Man, you don't know what they're do you have nightmares where you're just climbing down the infinite twisting ladder and you never reached the bottom. I have nightmares where Mr DNA is chasing me through the kitchen, and it's not exactly that's it, Mr DNA chasing me down an endless hallway, over and over. Let's get on with the show, all right. Okay, well let's start with the present. We're gonna it into some potential future technological uses of DNA. But what do we use DNA for

today besides making our own bodies? Ah? Well, it's it's honestly pretty pedestrian stuff. Okay, maybe maybe not pedestrian, And that's that's a dismissive word that that belies the wonder and amazement of stuff like like personal identification. Okay, we we can take a sample of stuff and tell who it came from. That's pretty rad I like how you say stuff. Well, I mean, you know, there's it can be a bone fragment, it can be some blood, it

can be hair, plus could be your eyeball. Yeah sure. Uh. And and as as we all know, like in forensics or paternity tests or historical studies of human remains, like Richard the third or whatever that is. Uh, is that the guy that we found under a car part? To call him? Just checking that I wasn't thinking about something else anyway. So yeah, yeah, we we can do all of those things with DNA today, and and it's it's probably the largest commercial field that we are using DNA

as a tool in currently. Another upcoming one is DNA sequencing as a branch of consumer health. Uh, because depending on what country you currently call home, you can either directly order or have a doctor order genetic tests, um, you know, tests that sequence your DNA either from a few specific genes or from your entire genome. And right now, mostly those tests are being used to tell you your your likelihood of developing certain diseases like a cancer or

or or heart disease stuff like that. But in the future, This might be a commonly used way of helping people make all kinds of honestly pretty mundane lifestyle choices about like diet and exercise and sleep patterns and sun exposure and and all kinds of stuff. That's a whole other episode though, And it's also something that I know some doctors are a little skittish about because they're worried that

people will go to private companies. In fact, this was one of the reasons that in America it's been a big issue of the of the FDA regulating it. Yeah, right, about going to a company and getting one of these, uh, these sequences printed out for you to tell you, like how likely are you to develop these things? Because they're worried. Doctors are worried that people will start to make medical decisions without having a full understanding of what it is

they're actually being presented with. Oh yeah, right, Because, as we were talking about in the previous episode, DNA is complicated. G and genes are not and we we've said before on the show jeans are not on off switches that that necessarily lead to a particular thing, And it's really your entire genome together with a whole lot of environmental effects that determine what's going to happen in your body.

So so yeah, I mean, I mean, caution is definitely necessitated, and it will be interesting to see where it goes, especially in this near future that's kind of like wild West we're living in where we have more information then

we know how to read. Another use for DNA though, Currently is UM is creating recombinant DNA, which is a a molecule of DNA that's been synthesized in a lab to include genetic information from more than one organism, and you know that, the idea being that the resulting organism will have beneficial properties or capabilities. And the most famous example of this is is GMO crops genetically modified organisms that are you know, meant to be eaten by us.

And we we did a couple episodes all about this back in July, I believe, But but real, real, briefly about GMOs, y'all. Just because food has been genetically modified doesn't mean it's bad or dangerous or unhealthy. Yeah, if you put fish jeans in a tomato, it doesn't necessarily mean that tomato is going to taste fishy. Ye. Now, of course That also doesn't mean that it's not possible to use genetically modified organisms in agriculture that might be

environmentally unsound or something like that. But there's nothing inherently wrong with the process of modifying an organism's genes in a laboratory setting, because we do it outside a laboratory setting already all the time, constantly and unconsciously. Yeah. Um. Although that that isn't the only use for recombinant DNA techniques. For for example, you've got bioremediation, which is a long word that means that we can use we can use

organisms to clean up our messes basically. So okay, So, for example, researchers have engineered a kind of bacteria that eat harmful pollutants and excrete harmless by products. Yeah. So this is like when you spill food on the floor and you let your dog look it up, except instead of a dog, it's a whole lot of bacteria, and instead of food on your floor, it's an oil spill that's literally ruining the ecosystem of a very large area

and and putting putting adorable penguins in dire danger. Um. It's also World Penguin Day, as we record this is it, It really is. It's DNA Day and World Penguin Day, same day. They have to share, fair enough, I mean penguins. Penguins are sharing to be fair though. It's National DNA Day, but World Penguin Day. Hold on, let me blow your mind. Did you know that all penguins on Earth have DNA except for one? And his name is Bruce. Bruce, what do you do? And Bruce? All right, I'm sorry we

got off topic. So yes, you can. You can create bacteria that are like really efficient at degrading crude oil, and and so you spray colonies of these suckers over an oil spill and they help clean the area up. Um.

There's been other projects where researchers created bacteria. Well, okay, there are bacteria that exist that break down t N t UM, which I'm not going to say the full name for because I can't pronounce it um, but but it's that explosive and it's it's commonly used for example in land mines and UH, and researchers create added genes to this type of bacteria that let them that make them glow when they break down t N t So you add these suckers to to soil in an area

that you think might contain land mines, and then you can do like a helicopter survey and see if it's glowing, and if it is, you know that that you know a don't go there right now, don't don't walk around um and and be add more bacteria there and they can eventually process that t NT. Yeah that's amazing. Yeah, it almost you could work intuitively. I mean, in a in a war zone, you might naturally want to avoid

fields that are glowing. Right It's not actually no, right now, whenever anything's glowing, I'm like, oh, let me go over there. I bet that has a health potion in it, thinking like another Ravell. Never mind, we'll use the helicopters. So so let's let's talk about some other kind of cool emerging or possibly a slightly futuristic uses of DNA. And the first one we wanted to talk about is one I can't wait to hear about because it's near and

dear to my heart. As the host of the tech Stuff podcast, I really am curious to hear how DNA

could be used as a diode, a little rectifier. Okay, So in April, some researchers from the University of Georgia right nearby here in Athens, and uh and Ben Gurion University in Israel published a paper in Nature Chemistry, and what this was was describing how they were able to construct an electrical diode on a single molecule of DNA, and if the researchers claims in the press are correct, this would be the smallest diode ever constructed by humans.

I don't know if anybody's disputing that. It seems it seems legit. Yeah, yeah, anyway, it's the sort of thing that obviously you have to have the evidence to support it and everything, But why would you make such a claim if if you didn't, it's as small as diode? Come on, what's a diode anyway? So a diode is

an electrical component. You put it in the circuit and it allows unidirectional flow of current, or actually what you should say is the current flows in one direction very easily, but encounters massive resistance if it tries to flow the opposite direction. And this can be used in a number of ways. For example, just one is as a fail safe device so as to prevent damage to equipment if the current in a circuit gets reversed. Yeah, it's absolutely imperative.

Diodes are are one of the most basic units in circuitry. Yeah, and it's sort of similar to to like a solenoid valve in a in a hose or in an engine kind of situation, like when when you have any kind of fluid that you want to go from one place to another and definitely not go in the other direction. Uh So, yes, good times, they're exact. Yeah. So so one again, one of the most basic elements of circuitry. You're probably really familiar with l e ed s. Those

are light emitting diodes. They actually serve a purpose beyond just emitting light. They actually they are also kind of like that that's sort of that that one way street sign that says electricity go this way, don't go back the other way. And so why is this relevant to that, Well, it actually has relevance to computing and to the potential termination of Moore's law, which we've talked about on on

this show before, so brief refresher Moore's law. It's the perhaps self fulfilling prophecy of Gordon Moore that the number of transistors you can fit onto an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so, eighteen months, two years or whatever um. And the practical takeaway is that affordable computer processing power follows an equivalent rate of evolution. Right, So these days we wouldn't say that in two years time we're going to fit twice as many uh discreet elements

on an integrated circuit. It doesn't follow that that pathway anymore. What instead we would tend to say is that the computers two years from now will be or eighteen months from now will be twice as as powerful, will be twice as fast as kind of Moore's law is one of those things where the definition of Moore's law changes every few years or so. But the just also, it's not a law, right, It's not a law it was it was originally an observation, like you said, it had

more to do with economics than actual computing power. The idea was that the ability to to uh manufacture chips that would have more discrete elements on them was going to become economically feasible over time. So he was really saying that because of the scale of manufacturing involved in our ability to innovate, it will allow for what we didn't have, as you know, the doubling of processing power every every eighteen months. But we dumb it down a lot.

Talk about our devices in our technoculture depend on this assumption. Things keep getting hard where it keeps getting faster. Yeah, you Otherwise you wouldn't have smartphones. You could, they would do the device would not be large enough to compensate for the massive amount of processing power you need to do the stuff your smartphone can do. Right, But you might be thinking about this now, and you might be thinking, wait a second, wait a second. So things keep getting smaller? Uh,

you can? You can fit more and more power into a dense area of of what the computer processing unit is. Eventually, aren't you going to run into physics problems? Well, yep, Eventually you are going to reach the limits of what you can do on a reasonably sized silicon semiconductor chip. You run into basic physics and chemistry issues. So is there any way to keep packing electronics and computer power into smaller and smaller spaces? Could we have electronic components,

including computing components, packed into a single molecule Maybe? And DNA might be the answer according to this d SO anyway, the lead author of the study bing Quon Zoo has pointed to quote the predictability, diversity, and programmability of DNA as attributes that make it sort of an ideal building material for nanoscale electronics. You know, electronics that are on

the molecule level. They're tiny. So in this experiment in the paper I mentioned earlier, Zoo and his colleagues built a single duplex DNA molecule out of eleven base pairs, and then they inserted it into a tiny circuit. And then the team placed a molecule called coraline in between specific layers of the DNA coil, and with this they were able to observe the DNA structure doing what a diode should do, meaning it allowed current to flow one

way but not the other. It specifically, the kernel out in the circuit was fifteen times stronger one way than it was the other. So they had built a DNA diode, or as I like to think of it, bingo diode DNA MR DNA. Are you going to chase be done that hallway again? Anyway? So a quote every Night Jenn a quote Zoo gave to the press. He said, our discovery can lead to progress in the design and construction of nanoscale electronics elements that are at least one thousand

times smaller than current components. So I think that's really interesting. What if one day we have uh, you know, uh, nanoscale electronics, tiny computing elements, computers that are built out of organic molecules and DNA, And I mean obviously, like if we're going to have armies of nano robots, this is going to be part of it. Yeah, very likely.

I mean you have to get to a point if you have a robot that has its own ability to control its own motions as opposed to some sort of external force, because most of the nanobots that we have talked about in previous episodes rely on some sort of external system manipulating their motion, like a electromy metic frequencies or ultrasonic frequencies or some kind of chemical reaction to

what's going on. Because because the way that we've been designing them, obviously the researchers say, we could never possibly have an energy source, right, So smaller energy control that's small to be within something like that, So fascinating, very cool stuff. And uh, I just love the idea that we could eventually have computers that could get a computer virus that could potentially be a real virus. Uh. One of the other things that we've talked about on this

show before is the idea of programmable matter. Yeah, the idea of having having just just stuff that you would then send some sort of command to and it would take whatever shape or form are not just form factor but function that you need it to do. Yeah, And it's funny because one of the main inspirations for stuff like this is going to be organic matter like proteins. You know, proteins can fold and refold themselves to take

on shapes that they need to do their function. And so if you have programma, will matter the matter should be able to maybe reshape itself or rearrange itself, either by moving different components around or by changing the shape

of the components to make different overall forms. Right the way that the basic molecule collagen is the stuff that makes your bones and your skin and structures and your eyeballs and all kinds of different tissues in your body, And it's the same basic protein, but it folds itself

up into all kinds of different shapes. So, uh, well, there's a group of researchers from Northwestern University who have been looking at using DNA along with gold nanoparticles to create different shapes, and it's kind of interesting how they're doing it. So what they're doing, they're essentially coding these gold nanoparticles with small strips of DNA. So you can think of it as but just one half of a

DNA strands. So you imagine splitting that that ladder down the middle and you've got one half of the strand on these gold nano particles. By introducing them to the other half, the complementary half of that DNA strand, they can cause the gold nano particles to take all sorts of different crystalline shapes. So this is a very tiny, tiny version, this nano sized version of this pluripotent material

that we've talked about in the past. So it's not something that you would use to make a giant armchair. You're not gonna have the golden throne for your Game of Thrones party. It's not gonna happen. But it's possible that this sort of approach could lead to uh advances in optics. So, for example, when you're designing something a lens, let's say, uh, you want to be able to control exactly what kind of light can pass through that lens.

By shaping these crystalline structures at the right distance from

one another. You can control for that you can allow it to or you can you can design such way that allows certain types of light, like certain colors of light to pass through, but not others, because you can you can be fine tune those spaces so well that certain wavelengths of light are the only ones allowed through, which is really kind of fascinating when you think about it, and it creates all sorts of different possibilities, including stuff

like a um advanced laser optics. So really an interesting idea, not necessarily something that we're going to see as a practical application in our daily lives, but when you talk about, you know, sort of this high end tech approach, it's really an interesting possibility. Okay, does does anyone have anything that is a little bit more like ground level practical something that could potentially change the way that we that

we do live our lives. Well, all right, we've we've talked in the past about how antibiotics are pretty amazing, but they're also something that we've depended upon, so heavily that we may have shot ourselves in the foot a little bit. And by shot ourselves in the foot a little bit, I mean given rise to potential really dangerous bacteria that we cannot defend ourselves against because they are

resistant to antibiotics. So we're creating the bacterial equivalent of Doomsday, where you just continue destroying them over and over again until they become invincible. Yeah, by foot we mean face,

and by face we mean immune system. Right, So in our batman versus superman versus bacterial infection, the bacterial infection has got a big leg up on everybody else right now, because, like we said, it leads to this this kind of superbug situation where you have bacteria that can infect a person and antibiotics will have no effect against them because the bacterial the bacteria have already developed an immunity to that antibiotic. Uh So, one other approach we could use

is using DNA to create viruses that target bacteria. So, in other words, we make a bug to kill a bug. So I have to remind you that viruses and bacteria are not the same thing, and they're not really They're very dissimilar organically speaking. So the virus would insert viral DNA into the bacterial cell, and that viral DNA might do one of a couple of different things. It might

shut down the bacteria's ability to resist antibiotics. So in other words, this could be like uh Obi Wan sneaking in and turning off that that that tractor beams so the millennium falcon can escape, except in this case we're

talking like more like a force field. So maybe it's more like Return of the Jedi where they have to go to the force moon of Indoor and destroy the ground based force field that's protecting the death Star that is fully operational up over in orbit at any rate I know I could go, So then you could do that, or it could even just kill the bacterial cell, like just just let's just bypass all that, or just render it harmless. Um So, these are all the basic things

that this viral genome could do if it were designed properly. Um. As a bonus, that approach can be tailored so that it targets specific types of bacteria. The virus have protein markers on them that search for other specific protein markers, and they will ignore anything that doesn't fit that description. Right, So it's almost like a cell seeking missile in a way. Well, if you design in such a way where it's it's looking for this harmful bacteria, it will leave all the

helpful bacteria alone. Oh that's really great because these days, I'm sure that that all y'all have experienced it. When you take an antibiotic, uh, you wind up with kind of an upset stomach for a few days because in addition to clearing out whatever infection you're trying to get rid of, that antibiotic is probably also destroying your microbiome, which is good for like digesting food, exactly right. So this would be potentially a gentler approach and it would

affect more dangerous bacterial strains. So it's a double win if we can make it work. But one of the other things I wanted to talk about. In fact, this was the basis of a video episode of Forward Thinking, and Lauren, you wrote the script and it was phenomenal. It's just a really cool idea is using DNA. I mean DNA it's all about holding information, right, it's information that makes us who we are. But we can use DNA to hold other types of information too, and not

just a little a whole lot of information. Yeah, and the train of thought here is that, Okay, we've got really amazing storage materials and technologies for data these days, but they have some downsides. And Okay, so you know, like like we've got we've got hard disk drives, which is you know, probably what's in your laptop or or your desktop computer, which work by magnetizing a faro magnetic film on a disc. And uh and the data is

encoded in the changes in the direction of magnetism. Okay. Um, if you remember floppy disks or like like you know, five and a quarter inch floppies anything like that, they used similar technology. This is why it was so much fun to drag a magnet over somebody's floppy disk. Oh uh, man, you or you were a mean middle schooler. I'm just kidding. I'm sure. No, No, Joe, you are truly the best of all of us. I didn't think that you would,

although now I wonder. I'll wonder every day anyway. That's also basically what makes a magnetic tape work, like like in cassette tapes or in not cassette tapes, because as it turns out, magnetic tape is not only used by kitchy hipster bands to uh to sell their albums these days. It's actually the highest capacity type of memory available on

the market because you can encode so much information into it. Um. Then there's also there's flash memory, uh, iterations of which are what's in your phone and your USB stick and like maybe your fancy, silent running computer. Um. And they work by the grace of wizards. Uh No, I mean probably not, but honestly I understand them really poorly. Jonathan fact check me on this. Basically, like a flash memory creates minute changes in voltage through transistors and then reads

those minute changes in order to tell you stuff. Yeah, that's one form of flash memory. But yes, you are correct, which they there are different types where some require constant power. As soon as they lose power than everything gets white. And then there are some that are persistent. Obviously, this would be more in the persistent realm, because you're talking about things like like thumb drives and stuff where you don't have a constant amount of battery attached. Yeah. Sure, um.

And then of course we have optical discs, CDs and DVDs in Blu ray which encode data and in tiny pits and ridges and then they scan those with a laser and that's how you figure stuff out. UM. So yes, all rad but downsides. First of all, they're they're pretty delicate. You don't want to jostle them around too much, or in the case of your your optical discs, you don't want to you know, scratch a huge key across them or something like that, because that will ruin them real fast.

You don't want to get them too hot or too cold, and the data in them will corrupt over time. UM. Your your hard drives, your flash drives, your your burn CDs can all corrupt in as little as five years, and magnetic tape can corrupt in as little as fifteen to thirty years. UM. Also, even though they can carry an impressive amount of information, especially if you remember those five and a quarter inch floppies and look at that in comparison to your cell phone and think about how

old you are. Um, the technical limits of those materials aren't all that high when you start to consider how much data we're creating every day, right, which is an unbelievable, massive, huge, enormous other adjectives amount of data. I mean, it's it's so big that it is impossible for me to get a handle on it. It is an amount so vast as to dwarf my sense of perspective every day. It's a massive amount of spying they're doing on you. We'll see.

That's the other problem, right, It's not just that we're creating a huge amount of data. We also need to make use of that data. And meanwhile, you have to put the data somewhere. And storage is a big thing. It's a it's a big issue. You want a storage medium that's going to be UH safe and secure. You want it to be uh to last a nice long time. You wanted to be really efficient at storing a massive

amount of data in a small amount of space. And like you you're saying, Lauren, the options we have are limited, sometimes in multiple uh features all at once, you know. So what's the solution. Well, strangely enough, this episode is about DNA. So baby, Hey, it's DNA, that's right, Yeah, yeah, DNA can be used for for data storage. It's hardy, it's half life, it's like five dred years, so it can it can potentially store data for like centuries, and

it can encode so much data. You guys, um in the video episode that I wrote about it, I did a whole bunch of wacky math and uh okay. So so d na's theoretical limit is more than an exhibite of data per cubic millimeter. An exhibite is a billion gigabytes. A cubic millimeter is a fraction of a drop, like to ten thousands of a teaspoon. So for a an incredibly small physical volume, you can hold an enormous amount

of digital information. Yeah. Um. In order to get that much information into magnetic tape, which is the densest storage medium available for purchase today, you'd need a hundred million cubic millimeters of space, which is like fifty two liter soda bottles as opposed to the fraction of a drop. Right, Even optical disk storage at its theoretical limit would still

require five two leader soda bottles worth of space. And again, since we're talking about creating this massive amount of information every single day, if you want to be able to store the information, particularly if you plan on doing something useful with it, like parsing through all that data because you're a nosy spy, uh, you want to have the most compact efficient means of data storage possible, because you're going to run out of space otherwise, or you're going

to have to figure out how long do I hold onto this data before I wipe it so I can hold onto the next match of data because another enormous amount is coming tomorrow. Yeah, um so so okay. So here's how the process works of encoding data into DNA.

You get some computer scientists and some bioengineers. Uh, you get them in the same room together, and you get them to design a system for encoding data in the nuclear basis the nucleotides of DNA and and these building blocks can basically be used like ones in zeros or you know, since there's four block box, you can use base four instead of binary, which is the approach that a team out of the University of Washington in collaboration

with Microsoft Research chose recently. The bioengineers can synthesize DNA, uh, you know, sticking the nucleotides together in a sequence into in order to encode your data. Um that this recent team even included little I D tags in the DNA sequences in order to make the data random access, like your hard drive is random access, which means that you have like a whole soup of information kind of like stuck on there, but you can pull out whatever bit

of information you want at any time. And uh, and so here you can have a whole vial of DNA and and you can still find whatever you need quickly. Right, Instead of having to read through the entire amount of data that has been encoded in that string, you can zone in on the specific string that's relevant to whatever

it is you need, which is incredibly important. Right. It's kind of like anyone who's who's played uh, just just a video game where you're playing something where it's it's reading from memory that that stuff is very responsive, and then you move into a new area where it has to consult the read off of the disk. Right, then

it slows everything down. Well, it's very important that we have this random access memory approach because otherwise, if you had this massive amount of data stored, it would still be very frustrating if it took you, you know, two days to find the specific part of the information you needed because it was buried so far deep in that DNA strand right that that is less useful scientifically speaking, um, Right, because in order to read the data that's written in

your DNA. You just sequence the DNA and then decode the data. And and in the downsides here are that it's currently so expensive to synthesize and sequence d N A and also it takes time, um like at least ten hours to to sequence your DNA so that you can get your data out of it. Um. But this recent team thinks that it could so easily be made cheaper and faster, especially you know, if there's a financial

incentive to do so. Um you know which there is, and not only for data storage, as we discussed in the previous episode. All Right, so we've talked about DNA being used as diodes, We've talked about DNA being used to target bacterial infections, DNA being used for data storage, DNA being used as a beverage, DNA chasing me down an endless hallway. What other uses, uh, could we see DNA applied toward in the future. Well, here's one that

I think is pretty interesting. So we've talked before about building organs in the lab, and they're they're multiple ways you can look at this. You can look at like the organ on the chip concept, or you can just talk about building organs actually as in like three D printing organs that would be uh, that would eventually be used as donor organs were not quite fully there yet. Um. But but we're making headway with a lot of this technology, and it's useful for lots of reasons, Like one of

the big ones is harm free research. You can test the effects of a drug or study the progression of a disease on a living organ without actually damaging a living person. So assembling these lab organs it it shouldn't be impossible, right, because it happens in nature. The cells in your body can do it. They can divide and self as symbol into a kidney or a liver, So why shouldn't they be able to do the same thing

in a controlled laboratory environment. They should. It's just not very easy at all and uh and so one of the things that we try to do is what we just mentioned, three D printing in organ like three D printing in a lab environment, depositing cells upon one another to eventually spit out a whole organ. But that's not as easy as it sounds. You encounter multiple problems. One of them is it's hard to get the cells to stick in the right place. Number two is it's hard

to print with enough precision. Ideally, what we'd want is single cell resolution, you know, upping the resolution on your printer. In this case, it would be upping the resolution until you print one cell at a time, and that's not

easy to do, right. And then on top of that, it's hard to keep cells from being damaged or killed in the printing process, right because if you just end up with a bunch of dead cells in your brand new organ you don't have a very useful organ want it for right, Well, we are not shooting the next episode of Game of Thrones, so we don't have a

need for visceron just to throw around everywhere. But interestingly, d NA plays a role other than encoding the building blocks to make cells in a solution that was proposed in a paper called program Synthesis of Three Dimensional Tissues in Nature Methods. And in this paper, the authors describe a method of constructing three D quote organoid like structures using the help of a kind of d N a vel crow that allows DNA coded cell structures to stick

to gel coded surfaces and to each other. And the method they have is is called d N A programmed assembly of cells or d pack uh, And it goes like this. The cells for creating the organoid structure get pieces of single stranded DNA inserted into their outer membrane, so you've gotta sell and you stick these little d

NA hairs all over the outside of it. So this means the cells are coded in DNA molecules that act sort of like code locked velcro h. They'll stick to DNA strands on the outside of other cells, but only the ones that have the right code sequences and lock up with the complementary. So what you can make with this is cells that are coded to stick to exactly the other cells you want them to and not stick

where you don't want them to. That's very clever. Yeah, it's very interesting, and so hopefully what they're saying is that this will help us build these organoid structures in the lab that will eventually aid in things like tissue specific cancer research. I just like the word organoid makes me think of like it's like some sort of he Man villain. But I have one last, one last future use of of d n A. That's pretty hot. You

guys are gonna like it. How hot? Is it? Like more than a hundred degrees celsius hot so hot, hot enough to boil water. Yeah, I'm talking about using DNA and a method that would allow engineers to build better facilities to harvest uh geothermal energy and converted into electricity. And you think, hell, what, how could DNA do that. I was really confused when I started reading the article because as I was reading the article, I was thinking,

I don't see where DNA comes into hear at all. Connection. Yeah, so here's the connection. Here's here's what the scientists we're working with. Um uh So a scientist or a grad student. You're in jong uh energy researcher. Stanford grad student was talking about using nanotracers. Grad students can be scientists, but nanotracers, well, well, grad student because not not fully outside a graduate school yet, but still has this idea about nano tracers used for

geo thermal surveying. So what what he did was they took nano tracers and naro tracers. You can just think of as it's a substance that you're pumping into a geo thermal reservoir to kind of see where it's connected to other wells, geo thermal wells in the area. If you have nano tracers popping out of one well, you're pumping them into another well, you say, oh, these two

are connected. But the problem is that if you have a pretty complex geo thermal reservoir system, you can't really be sure if you're if you're injecting nanotracers and mall locations, which nanotracers belong to which pump sites. Right, So if you're injecting the men that like five different sites and you're getting nanotracers out of a well, unless there's some way to identify those nanotracers, you cannot be certain that

they came from a specific injection site. Thus, you can't really say we've mapped this out and we know that these two points are connected. I might be one of the other points that are connected. But DNA could help

solve that problem. So what the researchers are suggesting is that you should encode the nanotracers with DNA and give them like a little name tag and identifier, so you know these nanotracers specifically are belonged to this injection site because it has this specific DNA sequence encoded in the nanotracer.

That would allow the researchers to create a more accurate geothermal map and help engineers decide the appropriate place to set up a facility or to inject water into the reservoir to break up rocks to get better access to geothermal energy. And in some of their experiments, you know, they haven't put this to practical use. They've done it

in the lab to make sure that this would actually work. Um, they use some some sand and they heated the sand to see if they used uh strands of DNA, if the strands could hold up under the conditions that they

would encounter out in the field. They saw that the DNA could remain intact after encountering temperatures as high as three d two degrees fahrenheit or a hundred fifty degrees celsius, which would be similar to what they would encounter if you were actually pumping them into these geo thermal reservoirs.

So it's kind of interesting they wouldn't They don't directly allow you to convert geo thermal energy into electricity, but they give more tools to the people who are who want to tap into that power and convert it into electricity.

And according to the researchers, they anticipate that with a conservative estimate, they said that in the future, we will rely on geo thermal energy to provide five percent of of the world's electricity, which sounds like a small amount until you start to actually look at numbers and see how much five percent accounts for, and it's enormous. So and of course every bit you can take away from fossil fuels is a big help in other areas. Oh, absolutely, yeah,

And and that's oh, that's it's so fascinating. I love these these approaches that people are using to take DNA and and and use it as an actual tool. I mean, we are a man the toolmaker, but but this is it's so it's so great that we're taking this this tiny thing that makes up ourselves that we only really started to get a handle on within the past century, and and we're we're bending it to our own power. Well,

I mean we uh. It's sort of the most fundamental level you can go to when you're talking about bio mimetics, right, well maybe not actually you can probably go to proteins maybe, which would be even simpler. But I mean, when you're talking about making technology or machines based off of principles that we see employed nature. These are the most fundamental machines out there. There's machines that make all the other machines, right.

I don't think when Friedrich Mesher was looking at all that PUS he was thinking, you know, I bet someday we're gonna store information in the stuff that's in this stuff that I don't even know the name for yet. I bet he wasn't thinking that. And I bet if we took the way back machine, we prove ourselves right. But we've run out of time. I wanted to go back to the PUS party so badly. Even the way back machine it's got, it's still recharging from our last jaunt,

so we're not going to be jumping in there anytime soon. Well, this has been a fun journey to go on with you guys, with the DNA molecule and with PUS. Yes, it's been. It's been educational, I will say now it's been. It's been really fascinating. And who knows what other potential applications we will find for DNA in the future. And of course there are all the other ones that we've talked about in previous episod Those things like uh, you know,

genetic medicine, that sort of stuff. The really looking at how we can use tools like Crisper in order to manipulate UH genes so that we can improve our health or perhaps even enhance ourselves in some ways, which of course is as a totally separate subject that has its own massive ball of ethical concerns attached to it, But all of it is is coming back to this, this

long chain molecule and uh really fascinating stuff. So guys, if you have any questions about Dinah, that's how I'm going to say it from now on, Thank you, Joe H. Then you should write us and send those questions, or if you have any suggestions for future episodes. You've got an idea, you want to know how X will work in the future, or maybe there's some emerging technology you want to hear more about. Right us, let us know.

Our email address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. At Twitter, we are f W thinking. Just search f W Thinking in Facebook search bar will pop right up and leave us a message there and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this topic. In the Future of Technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places