Scientists report that they have converted a record number of digital megabytes into genetic code. The entire set of Shakespearean sonnets, a 26-second clip of Martin Luther King?s "I have a dream" speech, a photograph?they?ve all been recorded onto synthetic DNA, where they could be safely stored for thousands of years. Although consumer uses of this tech are many years away, the scientists envision a cloud service where users could eventually upload their wedding videos, have them transcribed into DNA, and then receive the vials in the mail. That way their grandchildren would be able to transcribe the video into whatever medium folks will use to watch movies in the future.
Researchers aren?t proposing that we transcribe digital data into living creatures, since that would introduce mutations and size constraints, and would probably be bad for the organism too. They?re talking about producing synthetic DNA in the lab, specially created to store specific information and keep it intact. "When DNA is stored in a cool, dry place, we?ve recovered things that are hundreds of thousands of years old," says Sriram Kosuri, a biological engineer at Harvard University, who wasn?t involved in the current study. "Even if you buried it in your lawn it would last for thousands of years."
Kosuri was part of a team that last year encoded 70 billion copies of a book into a thumbnail-size chunk of DNA. The new study improves on that work by incorporating error correction. By making many copies of the DNA, the scientists were able to read the files back with 100 percent accuracy?avoiding mistakes created by either genetic "point mutations" or errors by the machine that synthesizes the DNA. In achieving such accuracy, the team has shown that this is "a realistic technology that might have a real use in the future," according to study author Nick Goldman, a biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute.
The process starts by transcribing the 0s and 1s of digital data into the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs of the genetic code. That?s relatively straightforward?just swapping some numbers for nucleotide bases. Then the scientists synthesize a new DNA molecule from scratch with the exact sequence they want, and store it in small vials at room temperature. When they want to read the messages within the DNA, they sequence the DNA, decode it, and reproduce the original file.
As one gram of DNA can hold up to 2.2 petabytes (or 2200 terabytes), the scientists propose that DNA-based archives could help absorb some of the ever-increasing amounts of data in the world. In 2011 humanity created 1.8 zettabytes of new data, or 1.8 billion terabytes. "Our ability to store increasing amounts of information on a hard disk or a magnetic tape is reaching its physical limits," Kosuri says.
And unlike other data storage technologies, DNA doesn?t need to be upgraded over time. "There will always be DNA-reading technology as long as there?s DNA-based life around," Ewen Birney, one of the study?s authors, said yesterday during a press conference.
But don?t start shopping around for a DNA hard drive yet. It takes a lot of time to both write and read DNA sequences, and it also requires laboratory equipment. A DNA library wouldn?t be searchable or accessible online, says Csaba Andras Moritz, a computer engineer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "This only has an application in archiving material that you don?t need to access often. You cannot use DNA for general-purpose storage."
Moritz points out that Flash, phase-change memory, and spin-transfer torque memory are all significantly cheaper than DNA storage and conveniently communicate with computers, so they could create archives that are accessible online. But the memory spans of these technologies are measured in tens of years, rather than hundreds or thousands, and they?d have to be rewritten every decade or so to maintain fidelity?not ideal for long-term storage.
Finally, bringing DNA data to the masses will require a drastic decrease in cost. According to the study, it costs more than $12,000 to encode one megabyte of data into DNA and another $200 to decode it. Yet costs are dropping. "This project would have been inconceivable about a decade ago?in that time frame it?s dropped about a millionfold in cost," Kosuri says. If the cost declines significantly, the study?s authors argue, DNA data storage could become consumer technology.
And if there?s one thing that will (hopefully) never go out of style on Earth, it?s DNA.
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