DNA for long term Data Storage
A DNA hard drive can store data for 1 MILLION years
Scientists have found a way to preserve the world's data for millions of years, Just one gram of DNA can store the equivalent
of 14,000 Blu-ray discs.
The hard drives and discs that we use to store all this information are frustratingly vulnerable, and unlikely to survive more
than a couple of hundred years.
Fortunately scientists have built a DNA time capsule that's capable of safely preserving all of our data for more than a million
years. And we’re kind of freaking out over how huge the implications are.
Researchers
already
knew
that
DNA
was
ideal
for
data
storage.
In
theory,
just
1
gram
of
DNA
is
capable
of
holding
455
exabytes,
which
is
the
equivalent
of
one
billion
gigabytes,
and
more
than
enough
space
to
store
all
of
Google,
Facebook and pretty much everyone else's data.
Storing
information
on
DNA
is
also
surprisingly
simple
-
researchers
just
need
to
program
the
A
and
C
base
pairs
of
DNA
as
a
binary
'0',
and
the
T
and
G
as
a
'1'.
But
the
researchers,
led
by
Robert
Grass
from
ETH
Zürich
in
Switzerland,
wanted
to
find
out
just
how
long
this
data
would
last.
DNA can definitely be durable - in 2013 scientists managed to sequence genetic code from 700,000-year-old horse bones -
but it has to be preserved in pretty specific conditions, otherwise it can change and break down as it's exposed to the
environment. So Glass's team decided to try to replicate a fossil, to see if it would help them create a long-lasting DNA hard
drive.
"Similar to these bones, we wanted to protect the information-bearing DNA with a synthetic 'fossil' shell," explained Grass in
a press release.
In order to do that, the team encoded Switzerland’s Federal Charter of 1921 and The Methods of Mechanical Theorems by
Archimedes onto a DNA strand - a total of 83 kilobytes of data. They then encapsulated the DNA into tiny glass spheres,
which were around 150 nanometres in diameter.
The researchers compared these glass spheres against other packaging methods by exposing them to temperatures of
between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius - conditions that replicated the chemical degradation that would usually occur over
hundreds of years, all crammed into a few destructive weeks.
They found that even after this sped-up degradation process, the DNA inside the glass spheres could easily be extracted
using a fluoride solution, and the data on it could still be read. In fact, these glass casings seem to work much like fossilised
bones.
Based on their results, which have been published in Angewandte Chemie, the team predicts that data stored on DNA could
survive over a million years if it was stored in temperatures below -18 degrees Celsius, for example, in a facility like the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is also known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. They say it could last 2,000 years if stored
somewhere less secure at 10 degrees Celsius - a similar average temperature to central Europe.
The tricky part of this whole process is that the data stored in DNA needs to be read properly in order for future civilisations
to be able to access it. And despite advances in sequencing technology, errors still arise from DNA sequencing.
The team overcame this by embedding a method for correcting any errors within the glass spheres, based on the Reed-
Solomon Codes, which help researchers transmit data over long distances.
Basically, additional information is attached to the actual data, to help people read it on the other end. This worked so well
that even after the test DNA had been kept in scorching and degrading conditions for a month, the team could still read
Switzerland’s Federal Charter and Archimedes’ wise words at the end of the study.
The other major problem, which is not so easy to overcome, is the fact that storing information on DNA is still extremely
expensive - it cost around US$1,500 just to encode the 83 kilobytes of data used in this study. Hopefully this cost will go
down as we get better at writing information onto DNA. Rsearchers out there are already storing books onto DNA, and the
band OK Go are also writing their new album into genetic information.
The question is, what would Grass store, now that he’s developed this mind-blowing time capsule? The documents in
Unesco’s Memory of the World Programme, and… Wikipedia, he says.
“Many entries are described in detail, others less so. This probably provides a good overview of what our society knows,
what occupies it and to what extent,” said Grass in the release.
Source: Scitech Alert / New Scientist
Version 12.4.3.s 10 September 2018