Imagine being able to store information in DNA. Now imagine being able to store actual digital images with the help of DNA. That's exactly what University of Washington and Microsoft researchers have managed to accomplish with a new technique.
In this new study, the researchers used a new method that can actually shrink the space needed to store digital data. More specifically, they successfully encoded digital data from four image files into a nucleotide sequence of synthetic DNA snippets. They were also able to reverse this process to retrieve the correct sequences from a larger pool of DNA and reconstruct the images without losing any data.
"Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works-it's very, very compact and very durable," said Luis Ceze, co-author of the latest study. "We're essentially repurposing it to store digital data-pictures, videos documents-in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years."
All of the data contained in the digital universe, which includes computer files, historic archives and other digital data, is expected to increase to 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. This is a tenfold increase compared to 2013 and will actually represent enough data to fill more than six stacks of computer tablets stretching to the moon. In fact, the world is producing data faster than it has the capacity to store it. This means that finding new ways to store data in a more compact matter will be huge moving forward.
In this case, the researchers developed an approach to convert zeroes and ones in digital data into adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.
"How you go from ones and zeroes to As, Gs, Cs, and Ts really matters because if you use a smart approach, you can make it very dense and you don't get a lot of errors," said Georg Seelig, co-author of the new study. "If you do it wrong, you get a lot of mistakes."
In this case, the researchers can chop the digital data into pieces and then store it by synthesizing a massive amount of tiny DNA molecules, which can then be dehydrated and preserved for long-term storage.
The findings could be huge when it comes to storing information for the future. This is especially important as the amount of information increases over time.
The study was presented at this year's ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.
