Brief Overview of Programming Mammalian Cells

[BillTre]

Bacterial cells have previously been programmed with human logic.
Mammalian cells are now being programmed by molecular biologists.
Among other things, they are using recombinases as parts of switch mechanisms to remove particular bits of DNA in response to an input.

These changes would have irreversible changes on what the cells do (can't reboot).

 

[Ygggdrasil]

A separate team published similar work September 2016 to use CRISPR as a means to make changes to a cell's in response to environmental inputs(see http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6304/aag0511.full, http://news.mit.edu/2016/recording-analog-memories-human-cells-0818). They envision using these technologies as research tools for monitoring the state of cells, where the readout would be high-throughput DNA sequencing (which can read millions of sequences in a single experiment). Adding the capability to do combinatorial sensing, as described by the article in the OP, could expand the capabilities of these tools.