Previously researchers at Harvard recorded 5.3 megabits of information in DNA in 2012. They did record many, many times at a density of 700 TB per gram.
The impressive part is not just how much data they were able to encode onto synthetic DNA and then decode. It’s also the space they were able to store it in.
Once encoded, the data occupied a spot in a test tube “much smaller than the tip of a pencil,” said Douglas Carmean, the partner architect at Microsoft overseeing the project.
Think of the amount of data in a big data center compressed into a few sugar cubes. Or all the publicly accessible data on the Internet slipped into a shoebox. That is the promise of DNA storage – once scientists are able to scale the technology and overcome a series of technical hurdles.
Digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube. Photo by Tara Brown Photography/University of Washington.
The Microsoft-UW team stored digital versions of works of art (including a high-definition video by the band OK Go!), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, the top 100 books of Project Guttenberg and the nonprofit Crop Trust’s seed database on DNA strands.
Demand for data storage is growing exponentially, and the capacity of existing storage media is not keeping pace. That’s making it hard for organizations that need to store a lot of data – such as hospitals with vast databases of patient data or companies with lots of video footage – to keep up. And it means information is being lost, and the problem will only worsen without a new solution.
DNA could be the answer.
It has several advantages as a storage medium. It’s compact, durable – capable of lasting for a very long time if kept in good conditions (DNA from woolly mammoths was recovered several thousand years after they went extinct, for instance) – and will always be current, the researchers believe.
“As long as there is DNA-based life on the planet, we’ll be interested in reading it,” said Karin Strauss, the principal Microsoft researcher on the project. “So it’s eternally relevant.”
This explains why the Microsoft-UW team is just one of a number of research groups around the globe pursuing the potential of DNA as a vast digital attic.
The researchers acknowledge they have a long way to go.
Luis Henrique Ceze, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and the university’s principal researcher on the project, said the biotechnology industry made big advances in both “synthesizing” (encoding) and “sequencing” (decoding) data in recent years. Even so, he said, the team still has a long way to go to make it viable as an archival technology.
SOURCES- Microsoft, University of washington, youtube