DNA could Replace Hard Drives for Storage

The first factor is the extremely small size of DNA, which is definitely needed if all the information in this digital age is going to be stored for thousands of years.

As a method to overcome these shortcomings, researchers are now turning to DNA and exploring ways to not only store the digital data but also preserve it for future generations.

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it”, he said in Feb 2015. In theory, a fraction of an ounce of DNA could store more than 300,000 terabytes.

For comparison, the best hard drives now available on the market can only store 6 terabytes of information and last for 50 years or less. While we use ones and zeros to represent data on hard drives, we use the nucleotides G, T, C and A to represent data in DNA strands. The novel research has been able to alleviate the issues of longevity in regards to modern technologies, like the hard drive, which always inevitably fails (especially when we need it the most, it seems). Grass’ staff has encoded DNA with 83 kilobytes of textual content from the Swiss Federal Constitution from 1291 and the Technique of Archimedes from the 10th century.

The DNA molecules were synthesised by machine and heated to 71C for a week, which is equivalent to being stored at 50C for 2 000 years, after which it was decoded back into the original text without any errors, Dr Grass told the meeting.

When the researchers decoded the DNA, they found no errors, indicating that the DNA held up well and the information they encoded stayed intact. DNA stores huge amounts of information that is never forgotten, never destroyed and never misused. It’s still prohibitively expensive, and there’s no system to search and archive the information-something the Swiss researchers plan to look into in the near future.

The demand for more digital storage will always be present.

This article was written by Alexandra Ossola from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

Archaeological findings have also revealed that it is possible to sequence the DNA which dates back hundreds of thousands of years.

“For those who return to medieval occasions in Europe, we had monks writing in books to transmit info for the longer term, and a few of these books nonetheless exist”, says Robert Grass, Ph.D. So, he and his colleagues are presently creating methods to label particular items of data on DNA strands to make them searchable. “Proper now, we will learn the whole lot that is in that drop. But I can’t point to a specific place within the drop and read only one file”, he added.

There’s one storage medium that still kicks the crap out of our state-of-the-art solid state, and humans didn’t invent it. It’s called DNA.

“This curiosity in preserving info is one thing we have now misplaced, particularly in a digital world”, he says. However, encoding and saving seven megabytes of data in DNA can apparently cost more than a thousand dollars. “And that is what I might like to assist tackle and encourage individuals to do: Save we’ve got at this time for future occasions”.