Saptaparna Pal, Amity University Kolkata
Currently, in our world, there are about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and each day human produces photos, emails, tweets, and other digital files that add on to another 2-4 million gigabytes of data. A massive amount of this data was stored in enormous facilities called exabyte data centers.
It was believed by many scientists that an alternate solution lies in the molecules that contain our genetic information which is used to store large quantities of information at a very high density. DNA can store information forever and another great property is that DNA polymer doesn’t consume any energy. It has been already demonstrated by scientists that they can translate images and pages of text as DNA. However, it would be helpful if there was a way to select the desired file from a combination of many DNA pieces.
Scientists have shown one way to accomplish this by encapsulating each data file in a 6-micrometer particle of silica that is labeled with a short DNA sequence containing the contents. With this approach, the researchers were able to significantly extract individual images stored in DNA sequences from a set of 20 photos. Texts, photos or, other information was encoded by the digital storage as a series of 0s and 1s. This same information can be encoded in DNA using the four nucleotides that make up the genetic code A T G and C.
Several other features of DNA make it desirable as a storage medium. DNA is very much stable and is very easy to synthesize and sequence. The disadvantage to this type of data storage is the cost of incorporating and sequencing such large amounts of DNA that it would cost a lot to note one petabyte of data. DNA storage has several drawbacks, including its high cost and the problem of picking out the file we want from all the others. A particular PCR primer binds to the sequence that includes each data file. Primers are added to the sample to pull out a specific sequence and amplify it. Although, one of the drawbacks to this approach is that the PCR retrieval process requires enzymes and ends up consuming a large amount of the DNA.
In a new retrieval technique, the scientists encapsulated each DNA file in small silica particles for a different approach. Single-stranded DNA barcodes were used to label each capsule that corresponds to the contents of the file. To demonstrate this approach cost-effectively, researchers encoded various images into pieces of DNA about 3000 nucleotides long, which is equivalent to approximately 100 bytes. However, DNA proves to be an excellent approach in storing data. The Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the US Army Research Office funded the research.
Also read: Enhancing diversity and inclusion within the genetics community
Reference:
- Could all your digital photos be stored as DNA?-MIT News- https://news.mit.edu/2021/dna-data-storage-0610
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