Currently, about ten billion gigabytes of digital data are stored on our planet, a figure that continues to grow as every day humans generate emails, photos, tweets and other digital files that continue to add up. Much of this data is stored in exabyte data centers (one exabyte equals one billion gigabytes), huge facilities that can be the size of several football fields and cost a lot of money to maintain and cost.
For years, many scientists have the idea of using another alternative storage center, nothing more and nothing less than DNA. After all, this molecule evolved precisely to contain massive amounts of information at very high density. And, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor of biological engineering Mark Bathe, a coffee cup filled with DNA could, theoretically, be capable of storing all the world’s data.
“We need new solutions to store these huge amounts of data that the world is accumulating, especially archival data,” explains the expert. ” DNA is a thousand times denser than flash memory, and another property is that once the DNA polymer is made, it does not consume energy. You can write the DNA and then store it forever .”
Scientists have already shown that they can encode images and pages of text as DNA. However, an easy way to select the desired file from a mix of many DNA fragments will also be needed, and this is the main stumbling block.
Bathe and his colleagues have demonstrated a way to do this in a paper published in the journal Nature Materials : The idea is to encapsulate each data file in a six-micron silica particle, which is tagged with short DNA sequences that reveal content and would function as a barcode. Using this approach, the researchers showed that they could accurately extract individual images stored as DNA sequences from a set of 20 images. Given the number of possible tags that could be used, this approach could scale up to 10-20 files.
For their barcodes, the researchers used single-stranded DNA sequences from a library of 100,000 sequences, each about 25 nucleotides in length, developed by Stephen Elledge, a professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School. If you placed two of these tags in each file, you can custom – label Oct. 10 different (10 billion) files, and with four labels on each can be labeled Oct. 20 files uniquely.
Bathe envisions that this type of DNA encapsulation could be useful for storing “cold” data, that is, data that is kept in a file and not accessed very frequently. His laboratory is developing technology for long-term DNA storage, both for long-term storage of DNA data, as well as for short-term clinical and other pre-existing DNA samples. “While it may take a while before DNA becomes viable as a data storage medium, today there is already an urgent need for low-cost, mass storage solutions for pre-existing DNA and RNA samples from Covid-19 testing. , human genomic sequencing and other areas of genomics “, concludes the expert.
