Saturday, April 13, 2013
Forget about your portable hard drive. Scientists have successfully stored computer files on a strand of DNA.
Scientists
Storing information is what DNA does best. DNA holds the genetic code of each species, and spells out the exact instructions required to create a particular organism. The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The information stored on computers is binary, meaning the data is represented by 1s and 0s. Scientists have long tried to replicate nature’s way of storing information, but it’s been elusive until now.
The European Bioinformatics Institute generates a huge amount of data, and data storage is a real concern. Goldman and his colleague, Ewan Birney, dreamed up the solution over a few beers one evening. Previous attempts at encoding data onto DNA failed because those methods tried to translate a computer’s binary data directly onto the DNA – and binary repetition caused errors in retrieval. The team was able to translate the binary information into ternary information (that uses 0, 1, and 2), and then encode that into the DNA. The researchers think their system might be able to store the roughly 3 zettabytes (a zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes) of digital data thought to presently exist in the world! DNA double
