Scientists say they have taken an important step towards storing information in the form of DNA molecules, which are more compact and durable than other storage media.
The magnetic hard drives we currently use to store computer data can take up a lot of space—and need to be replaced over time.
The use of the preferred storage medium for living organisms as backup of our precious data would allow us to archive immense amounts of information in tiny molecules. These data would last thousands of years, according to the scientists.
A team in Atlanta, United States, has just developed a chip that, they say, could multiply the quality of existing forms of DNA storage by a hundred.
“The number of functions on our new chip is already [cerca de] a hundred times larger than today’s commercial devices,” as reported by BBC News Georgia Institute for Technological Research (GTRI) researcher Nicholas Guise. of the program—we hope to improve by about a hundred times the existing DNA data storage technology.”
The technology works by growing unique DNA strands, one block at a time. These building blocks are known as bases—four distinct chemical units that make up the DNA molecule. They are: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.
The bases can then be used to encode information, analogous to the sequences of 1 and 0 (binary code) that store data in traditional computing.
There are several possible ways to store this information in DNA. Binary code zero, for example, can be represented by adenine or cytosine bases, and one can be represented by guanine or thymine. Or one and zero can be mapped with just two of the four bases.
Scientists say that, formatted in DNA, all the films ever produced could occupy a volume smaller than an ice cube.
With all this reliability and compression, it’s not surprising the widespread interest that DNA has sparked in becoming the next archival medium for data that needs to be kept indefinitely.
The structures of the chip used to grow the DNA are called microcavities and are only a few hundred nanometers deep — less than the thickness of a sheet of paper.
The current prototype microchip is a square about 2.5 cm long that has numerous micro-cavities, allowing several strands of DNA to be synthesized in parallel. This will allow for the cultivation of larger amounts of DNA in a shorter amount of time.
As this is a prototype, not all microcavities are connected. This means that the total amount of data that can be stored in DNA with that particular chip is currently less than what the major synthesis companies on commercial chips can produce.
But Guise explains that this situation will change when everything is completed. The current record for storing digital data in DNA is around 200 MB, with each isolated synthesis taking around 24 hours to complete. The new technology could write a hundred times more data into DNA in the same amount of time.
The current high cost of DNA storage has restricted the technology to very specific customers, such as those looking to archive information in time capsules. But the GTRI team believes their work can help dilute that cost.
The institute has partnered with two California biotechnology companies in the United States to develop a commercially viable demonstration of this technology: Twist Bioscience and Roswell Biotechnologies.
Initially, storing data in DNA will not replace existing server towers to provide fast and frequent access to information. Due to the time required to read the strings, this technique would be most useful for information that needs to be kept available for long periods of time but is only accessed occasionally.
Currently, this type of data is stored on magnetic tapes that must be replaced every about ten years. But with DNA, “provided it is kept at a low enough temperature, the data will survive for thousands of years, so its cost of ownership drops to almost zero,” explains Guise.
“A lot of money is spent to write the DNA at the beginning and to read the DNA at the other end. If we can make the cost of this technology competitive with the cost of recording the data magnetically, the cost of storing and maintaining the information in DNA throughout of so many years should be lower,” he says.
DNA storage has a higher error rate than conventional hard disk storage. In collaboration with the University of Washington, in the United States, the GTRI researchers created a way to identify and correct these errors.
The work has the support of the US government organization Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which encourages science aimed at solving relevant challenges for the US intelligence community.
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