A team of researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (USA) has turned to an old solution from nature itself to store information with an extraordinary capacity: DNA. Scientists have designed a system capable of storing 215 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 billion megabytes) of data per gram of genetic material , which is 100 times more powerful than previous attempts at storing DNA.
Experts have devised an algorithm that can unlock the potential storage of DNA almost entirely , compressing information into its four basic nucleotides without danger of it being lost or degraded over time.
There is no better storage medium than DNA since it is ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool and dry place, as various studies have already shown.
“DNA will not degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it will not become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, co-author of the work.
In all, they chose six files to encode or write to DNA : a complete computer operating system, an 1895 French film, “Train Arrival at La Ciotat,” a $ 50 gift from Amazon, a computer virus, a Pioneer plate and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon.
All the data was compressed into a master file , and then divided into short strings of binary code made up of ones and zeros. Using an erasure correction algorithm called ‘source code’, they randomly packed those strings into modules, where the information was translated into the genetic code (with the four nucleotide bases A, C, G and T). Finally, the combinations that could cause errors were eliminated and a barcode was added to remount or recover the files later.
In total, they generated a digital list of 72,000 strands of DNA and sent it to a text file to a group that synthesizes DNA to contain digital information, the company ‘ Twist Bioscienc e’. Two weeks later, they received a vial with a speck of DNA molecules.
To retrieve the files, they used sequencing technology to read the DNA strands, followed by specialized software to translate the genetic code into binary. They finally managed to recover their files without errors.
This coding strategy stores 215 petabytes of data in a single gram of DNA – 100 times more than the methods published by pioneering researchers George Church at Harvard and Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney at the European Institute of Bioinformatics. “We believe this is the highest density data storage device ever created,” Erlich said.
The problem
The method is effective, however, it has a drawback: the price. The researchers spent $ 7,000 to synthesize the DNA to archive 2 megabytes of data and another $ 2,000 to read it. Will the wreck go down? If lower quality molecules are produced, it is possible, so it is foreseeable that in the coming years we will continue to see progress in this regard.
The study has been published in the journal Science.
