At this given moment, there's around three zettabytes of digital memory we carry in the world but how is all this information supposed to survive for long after we are gone? Hard drives are relatively expensive and need electricity to work. Mediums like magnetic tapes which work without electricity only keep their information for few years.
By this time biological sciences belong to the biggest producers of data with their genetic sequencing. Now there's a possible solution to the memory preservation problem coming from that field: Scientists at the institute for Biological Computer Sciences of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI) have developed a method to save digital data in DNA - the substance each cell of our body contains.
Extremely durable data storage
According to the scientist, it's very well known that DNA is very durable: It's possible to even extract DNA from a mammoth which lived tens of thousands of years before our time. Also, it neither takes up a lot space nor does it need electricity to work.
While computer scientists in the field of biology have learnt to read dna in high speed, writing them put them before two problems: The first one is that it's only possible to create short fragments of dna. The second problem is that especially when there are repeating letters, errors might occur.
Error elimination
There's a new method that at least eliminates the second problem: The still small dna fragments get written on with overlapping rows of characters. To test their procedure for success, the scientists sent things like 154 sonnets and a speech of Martin Luther King along with an appropriate instruction for the Californian company Agilent Technologies that creates artificial dna for them to save it. The Californian company did their job and sent a little pinch of "dust" back to Europe. This is where this synthetic DNA could indeed be read error-free, the scientists around Goldman in their technical magazine "Nature" report.
The scientists is convinced of the potential his method has which also puts new dimensions on how much information you can store on how little space. 100 million hours of HD videos could be stored in dna the size of a tea cup. The only problem left are the high costs the creation of a such brings with it. According to Goldman's estimates this method could be used commercially by no later than ten years from now.
Nature: "Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA"
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