Hard Drive Of The Future: Storing Data On DNA Strands

Researchers have come a step closer to developing a technology with the ability to safely store data for thousands of years.
The breakthrough came as with researchers putting the data onto microscopic strands of DNA, writes Tech Times.

A team of researchers demonstrated to a meeting of the American Chemical Society that they had been able to encapsulate information on DNA that endured the equivalent of 2,000 years in storage. When the data was retrieved and then decoded they found that it was also error-free.
The researchers were able to simulate two centuries of time passing by embedding the DNA in spheres of silica and heating them to 160 degrees Fahrenheit and leaving the DNA stored at that temperature for a week.
The scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich said that they had successfully used the method to encode images, video and audio with the DNA technique, and that the long-term storage technique could accommodate anything able to be recorded as digital binary code.

As digital technology creates increasingly bigger amounts of data, a way of storing this information in a compacted way becomes desirable, they say.
"A little after the discovery of the double helix architecture of DNA, people figured out that the coding language of nature is very similar to the binary language we use in computers," researcher Robert Grass said in a press release. "On a hard drive, we use 0s and 1s to represent data, and in DNA, we have four nucleotides A, C, T and G."
The long storage capability does not require a constant electricity supply, and does not degrade like other archiving techniques in the same category - including hard drives and magnetic tape, the researchers suggest.
Such storage media haven't necessary been a step forward, they suggest.
"If you go back to medieval times in Europe, we had monks writing in books to transmit information for the future, and some of those books still exist," says Grass. "Now, we save information on hard drives, which wear out in a few decades."

The researchers note that storage capacity is just as important as longevity. While an external hardrive can hold up to 5 terabytes of data and preserve it for a maximum of 50 years - DNA weighing less than an ounce could theoretically store more than 300,000 terabytes.

DNA from archaeological finds many hundreds of thousands years old - are still able to be decoded now, which suggests that data encoded onto DNA can be preserved for as long as necessary, the researchers suggest.
However, researchers have some work to do - including how to create a searchable system within the DNA and how to make the technology affordable. It would currently cost thousands of dollars to encode and save several megabytes of data.
Source : designntrend

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