Unlocking DNA's True Potential

In the Information Age, as we grow more intelligent, large caches for information can become hard to develop as all data storage has a physical limit for their size.

But, what if we were able to overcome that? What if we could overcome that and have the ability to store the data for thousands of years with little falter?

Scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute have created a solution. It is a solution that further unlocks the true potential that lies within our own DNA.

 As we know by now, DNA is the protein that can be used to store genetic information. Scientists have now devised a way to store information other than genetics in synthesized DNA. The scientists translated their information to the DNA by attaching their ternary code of 0's, 1's and 2's to specific chemical bases, those being adenosine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. You may or may not have realized that ternary code may out of the ordinary, it is. What the scientists did was translated binary to ternary code because binary code of 0's and 1's (OFF and ON), could create a string of the same chemical base. That would mean something like GGGG, this was because either number was responsible for 2 bases. The scientists also specifically coded the translator to ensure that no two bases could lie adjacent to each other.

The scientists also created a fail save by essentially splitting the data into thousands of DNA "chunks". They would then encode each chunks with the same data four times, each using a forth of the chunk. They could then figure out what was the accurate copy by looking at the majority, if the synthesizer was at fault.

At Cambridge, the scientists using this technology have set a world record by successfully storing and recovering 739.3 kilobytes of data to 100% accuracy. That's enough data to store a partial MP3 recording of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and a PDF file of a paper by Francis Crick and James Watson describing the structure of DNA.

One enormously valuable property that DNA has is that it is translatable for tens of thousands of years. DNA has a very long life span given a lack of water, heat and light (or any radiation). DNA has a long enough life span that we can recover samples from primitive humans and the mammoths. We now have the potential to store data in something that lasts longer than any book, let it not be set in stone, let it be set in DNA! 

The density of such storage is also enormous. In the entire world, we have an estimated 3 zettabytes of data. To put that into perspective, take this document, now make three hundred million billion copies of it. That's a lot of information. Now, what if I were to tell you we could store every one of those copies in the back of a dump truck? That is, every gram of DNA has the potential to store three hundred billion of those documents. That's the power of size.

DNA's downfall is it's cost. It currently costs about $12,400 per megabyte to translate. If we do the math, our document here is about 3kb, which means that it would cost about $37.20 just to transfer. The costs to actually pull off such a feat as storing the world's information would be beyond astronomical. We have the technology, we simply haven't innovated it enough to make it viable for real-world applications.

Nature of Science themes found in this article:
The role of motivation and curiosity - What may have been an initially wacky idea thought up in a pub turned out to discover valuable new information.
Science is collaborative - The project involved information derived from numerous experiments conducted in the last 100 years. It was also the brainchild of two scientists and required a team to conduct.
Science is based on evidence - The experiment is the culmination of the efforts for research on DNA. We know we can store information because we know its function.


Gene Harvey
Hour 1


For more information:

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21570671-archives-could-last-thousands-years-when-stored-dna-instead-magnetic

and its citation

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v494/n7435/full/nature11875.html

as well as the journal's own article on the subject

http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-turn-living-cells-into-computers-1.12406

picture accredited to


http://tinyurl.com/ao5wud9