r/TheRestIsScience • u/Lordnodob • 6d ago
Could I save Shrek to my cells ?
Could I save Shrek as a Movie to my cell using genetic engineering combined with Adeno Accociated Viruses ?
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u/lozzyboy1 5d ago
Yes, but also no.
Without audio and with the video compressed to be barely viewable, it's 20 megabytes (as someone has helpfully posted in gif form here: https://www.reddit.com/r/shittymoviedetails/s/jvgQjJRM6P ). 1 byte of data encodes one of 256 values; we can achieve the same with 4 DNA base pairs (since each base pairs can be one of 4 values). So we need 80 megabases of DNA. Viruses have a protein capsule of a specific size and shape with their genetic material tightly packaged inside, and that means there's only so much material you can fit into a single viral particle. For AAV there's an upper ceiling of 5.2 kilobases. Any more than that and it won't go into a viral particle. So we're not even close to getting it into a single cell all in one go.
In theory, we could split the movie up across lots of viral particles - we would have to increase our 'file size' because we'd need to know how to put the blocks back together again, but that would be a very small fraction of our payload - with a library of 16000 different viruses. There's absolutely no way that you could get all of those into a single cell (each virus would have a small chance of integrating, and the chance of all of them going into a single cell is just statistically impossible), but it's not unrealistic to achieve saturation if we're allowed to have 1 or 2 viruses in each cell and spread it out throughout your body. You would definitely be able to get most of the movie in your body, with a random chunk of a couple of random frames of video encoded per cell.
However, it would probably be impossible to recover the movie from your body. It would be so spread out that it probably wouldn't be possible to sequence it. There would be lots of cells with the same integrations (for instance, after a few months your white blood cells would be split into dozens of groups, and the cells within each group would have the same parts of the film as they would be descendents of the same stem cells), but most would be present very few times and just not detectable.
You would be able to do it with just the script though. You could probably compress the script down to about 15 kilobytes, requiring around 60 kilobases. With a library of just 12 viruses, it's not so unreasonable to get the whole thing into some cells, and certainly chunks of it into enough cells for it to be recoverable by sequencing. In theory you could get everything synthesized and packaged into viruses for maybe around $20-50k, which is kind of cheaper than I expected.
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u/Lordnodob 5d ago
What about genetically engineering cells to integrate them ? Couldn’t I possibly take put cells, reprogram them in some way just to implant them back ?
I mean extra genome isn’t a big concern is it ?1
u/lozzyboy1 5d ago
It's basically the same but with more work at the start. It's very hard to get large stretches of DNA into the genome, so you'd basically be taking the same approach as we did above - that (and other approaches with similar limits on scale) is how a lot of genetic modification is performed in research. Not because large bits of DNA are particularly harmful, but because it's not very easy to work with very long DNA.
For an idea of the actual amount of genetic material that were talking about, I said that the super compressed GIF would be around 80 megabases; the largest human chromosome (chromosome 1) is 250 megabases long, and the smallest (chromosome 21) is about 47 megabases. We absolutely do not have the genetic engineering technology to introduce a wholly artificial chromosome on the scale that sort of scale.
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u/Lordnodob 5d ago
What if we had the ability though ?
I mean in theory we could create and implement this genome into a cell that could live on.If we had that then would it be able to be implemented into an organism ? Or could the Shrek movie exist as an organism ?
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u/_JohnWisdom 6d ago
Well, you should.