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You Can Squeeze 2.2 Petabytes of Data Into One Gram of DNA
Scientists from the European Bioinformatics
Institute are squeezing unparalleled amounts of data in to synthetic
DNA, and now they've achieved something absolutely amazing: they can store 2.2 petabytes of information in a single gram of DNA, and recover it with 100 percent accuracy.
The researchers have encoded an MP3 of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream" speech, along with all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, into a string of DNA. Scaled up, that represents a storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram. What's amazing, though, is that they've managed to achieve that whilst also implementing error correction in the complex chains of molecules, allowing them to retrieve content with 100 per cent accuracy.
The technique uses the four bases of DNA—A, T, C and G—to achieve the high information density. It is, understandably, still incredibly expensive: creating synthetic DNA and then sequencing it to read off the data is getting far easier, but it's still a time- and cash-consuming business. Keep hold of your hard drives for now, but DNA could represent a viable storage solution in the future. [Nature via New Scientist]
Image by Tacu Alexei/Shutterstock
The researchers have encoded an MP3 of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream" speech, along with all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, into a string of DNA. Scaled up, that represents a storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram. What's amazing, though, is that they've managed to achieve that whilst also implementing error correction in the complex chains of molecules, allowing them to retrieve content with 100 per cent accuracy.
The technique uses the four bases of DNA—A, T, C and G—to achieve the high information density. It is, understandably, still incredibly expensive: creating synthetic DNA and then sequencing it to read off the data is getting far easier, but it's still a time- and cash-consuming business. Keep hold of your hard drives for now, but DNA could represent a viable storage solution in the future. [Nature via New Scientist]
Image by Tacu Alexei/Shutterstock
Towards practical, high-capacity,
low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA
- Nature
- (2013)
- doi:10.1038/nature11875
- Received
- Accepted
- Published online
Digital
production, transmission and storage have revolutionized how we access
and use information but have also made archiving an increasingly complex
task that requires active, continuing maintenance of digital media.
This challenge has focused some interest on DNA as an attractive target
for information storage1 because of its capacity for high-density information encoding, longevity under easily achieved conditions2, 3, 4
and proven track record as an information bearer. Previous DNA-based
information storage approaches have encoded only trivial amounts of
information5, 6, 7 or were not amenable to scaling-up8, and used no robust error-correction and lacked examination of their cost-efficiency for large-scale information archival9.
Here we describe a scalable method that can reliably store more
information than has been handled before. We encoded computer files
totalling 739 kilobytes of hard-disk storage and with an estimated
Shannon information10 of 5.2 × 106
bits into a DNA code, synthesized this DNA, sequenced it and
reconstructed the original files with 100% accuracy. Theoretical
analysis indicates that our DNA-based storage scheme could be scaled far
beyond current global information volumes and offers a realistic
technology for large-scale, long-term and infrequently accessed digital
archiving. In fact, current trends in technological advances are
reducing DNA synthesis costs at a pace that should make our scheme
cost-effective for sub-50-year archiving within a decade. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11875.html
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