As it stands, the process of writing and reading data onto DNA strands is still a long way off fbefore it will be put to good use storing family snapshots and cat videos, thanks to the equipment required and the associated cost, but research is ongoing.
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Researchers have smashed the record for storing digital data on DNA, Microsoft announced yesterday.
In what is being hailed as a world record, the computer scientists and electrical engineers stored – and retrieved – 200 megabytes of data in DNA molecules, according to a news release.
The researchers could store and retrieve high-definition digital video, the top 100 books from Project Guttenberg, and copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, in the small DNA strands. “Or all the publicly accessible data on the Internet slipped into a shoebox”, Redmond said in a blog post.
“Interestingly, DNA already has a digital “flavor, ‘ as it has four bases and molecules that ‘stick” to each other in a very programmable way”, says Ceze. When the remains of wooly mammoths were discovered in recent years, researchers were able to sequence the genome, despite most specimens having died more than 10,000 years ago, thanks to the relative stability of the DNA molecule. For all that we have been blaming our genes for, there is little that we understand about them but scientific research over the past decade is now allowing us to unlock the mystery of DNA to the point that we may be able to recreate DNA with all its properties in the coming decades.
DNA-based storage offers a solution to the problem of impermanence. “We’re going to nature to build better computers”.
To access the stored data, the researchers encode the equivalent of zip codes and street addresses into the DNA sequences. The three-dimensional double helix molecule that carries genetic instructions in almost all living organisms is realized as a possible replacement for magnetic tape, which is the current standard for long-term data stores.
Whether it’s books, cassettes, CD’s, DVD’s, or the cloud, technology has always advanced faster than we can convert the old media to the newest medium. “So it’s eternally relevant”.
There are a couple of advantages to storing data this way. While the biotechnology industry is making great strides, DNA as a viable archival technology is still years away.
Think of the amount of data in a big data center compressed into a few sugar cubes. The team uses polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that molecular biologists use routinely to manipulate DNA, to multiply or “amplify” the strands it wants to recover. The researchers said that further they would evaluate the design using simulation to understand the error-correction characteristics of different encoding schemes.
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The DNA technology is progressing at a pretty heady pace, according to Microsoft, which claimed that researchers have increased the storage capability in synthetic DNA by a factor of 1,000 in the past year.
