Need to store 455 billion gigs of data? All it takes is a gram of DNA

DNA - the ideal data storage solution

We only discovered DNA, the building blocks of life, in 1859. It took another 84 years before we actually identified its structure. Since then, our understanding of DNA has grown in leaps and bounds, allowing us to manipulate it and use it to identify and profile individuals among countless other uses and applications.

But at its heart, DNA is essentially a database of genetic information. Even better, it's been developed and refined by nature over billions of years, making it incredibly efficient and compact. So, if nature already has a hyper-efficient data storage mechanism for genetic information, scientists figured it could be used to store digital data as well.

The reasons for choosing DNA are manifold. For a start, it's super dense. While the most advanced magnetic tapes can store about 10 GB/mm3 and magnetic discs can manage about 100 GB/mm3, DNA is far more efficient - able to store 1,000,000,000 GB/mm3. A single gram of DNA can theoretically store up to 455 exabytes (one exabyte = 1 billion GB) of data. In 2006, the total storage of the entire internet was just over half this size.

DNA also has the added benefit of being extremely durable. The DNA samples recovered from fossils that are hundreds of thousands of years old stand testament to this. Scientists estimate that, even in harsh conditions, DNA has a half-life of 500 years, making it far more durable than tapes and discs which last a couple of decades at best.

DNA - just another programming code

Storing data in DNA relies on the basic structural similarity of DNA and binary code. While the basic units of binary are 0s and 1s, DNA is made of 4 nucleotides, cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A) and thymine (T).

When stored in digital form, information is converted into strings of 1s and 0s. To go the extra step and store the information in DNA, scientists translated the binary code into sequences of nucleotides.

These sequences can then be synthesised to create DNA strands containing digital data.

Scientists can then read back the data by sequencing the DNA.

The evolution of DNA data storage

The first successful attempt at using DNA to store digital data was in 1999 when a 23 character message was stored on a microdot of DNA. Fast forward to 2012 and researchers at Harvard University showed it was possible to encode a staggering 70 billion copies of a book in a cubic millimetre of DNA.

Just a year later, scientists in the UK showed that the stored information was retrievable by sequencing the DNA. They even managed to store and recover 739 kilobytes of data consisting of text, audio and video in a single strand of DNA.

Now, efforts by researchers at the University of Illinois and a collaborative effort between the University of Washington (UW) and Microsoft have taken the field forward significantly.

While the Microsoft-UW collaboration managed to access and re-create specific images stored in a larger DNA data pool, the University of Illinois researchers have shown that parts of the stored data can even be targeted and edited.

Even better, the UW-Microsoft efforts have managed to further improve upon the storage capacity of DNA. They did this by using an audio compression tool called the Huffman code which allows binary to be expressed in shorter ways. This meant that redundancies - replicating the same sequences multiple times in case of errors - could now be done away with.

Not quite there yet

However, while the new breakthroughs are incredibly exciting, it will still be a while before you DNA data storage in daily life. While the cost of the processes involved in DNA data storage are falling every year, it's still a long way away from being commercially viable for the common person.

The speed of the process is also much slower than conventional data storage. While microchips rely on the lightning-fast pace of electrons, DNA data storage involves the actual movement of DNA molecules, a considerably slower process.

With our data storage needs increasing, expect the demand for DNA data storage to increase too. And when demand increases, research and funding will result in a considerably quicker, cheaper process.

So while DNA data storage is currently ideal for archival processes, where speed is not the issue, it may one day leave the confines of large corporations and enter your house.

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