Researchers have developed one of the first complete systems to store digital data in DNA -- allowing companies to store data that today would fill a big box store super-center in a space the size of a sugar cube.
All the movies, images, emails and other digital data from more than 600
basic smartphones (10,000 gigabytes) can be stored in the faint pink
smear of DNA at the end of this test tube.
Photo Credit: Tara Brown Photography/ University of Washington
Technology companies routinely build
sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial
transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard.
But a new technique developed by University of Washington and
Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital
data that today would fill a Walmart super-center down to the size of a
sugar cube.
The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed
one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital
data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times
more compactly than current archival technologies.
In one experiment outlined in a paper presented in April at the ACM
International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming
Languages and Operating Systems, the team successfully encoded digital
data from four image files into the nucleotide sequences of synthetic
DNA snippets.
More significantly, they were also able to reverse that process --
retrieving the correct sequences from a larger pool of DNA and
reconstructing the images without losing a single byte of information.
The team has also encoded and retrieved data that authenticates
archival video files from the UW's Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal
project that contain interviews with judges, lawyers and other personnel
from the Rwandan war crime tribunal.
"Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that
efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a
living system works -- it's very, very compact and very durable," said
co-author Luis Ceze, UW associate professor of computer science and
engineering.
"We're essentially re-purposing it to store digital data -- pictures,
videos, documents -- in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of
years."
The digital universe -- all the data contained in our computer files,
historic archives, movies, photo collections and the exploding volume
of digital information collected by businesses and devices worldwide --
is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020.
That's a tenfold increase compared to 2013, and will represent enough
data to fill more than six stacks of computer tablets stretching to the
moon. While not all of that information needs to be saved, the world is
producing data faster than the capacity to store it.
DNA molecules can store information many millions of times more
densely than existing technologies for digital storage -- flash drives,
hard drives, magnetic and optical media. Those systems also degrade
after a few years or decades, while DNA can reliably preserve
information for centuries. DNA is best suited for archival applications,
rather than instances where files need to be accessed immediately.
The team from the Molecular Information Systems Lab housed in the UW
Electrical Engineering Building, in close collaboration with Microsoft
Research, is developing a DNA-based storage system that it expects could
address the world's needs for archival storage.
First, the researchers developed a novel approach to convert the long
strings of ones and zeroes in digital data into the four basic building
blocks of DNA sequences -- adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.
"How you go from ones and zeroes to As, Gs, Cs and Ts really matters
because if you use a smart approach, you can make it very dense and you
don't get a lot of errors," said co-author Georg Seelig, a UW associate
professor of electrical engineering and of computer science and
engineering. "If you do it wrong, you get a lot of mistakes."
The digital data is chopped into pieces and stored by synthesizing a
massive number of tiny DNA molecules, which can be dehydrated or
otherwise preserved for long-term storage.
The UW and Microsoft researchers are one of two teams nationwide that
have also demonstrated the ability to perform "random access" -- to
identify and retrieve the correct sequences from this large pool of
random DNA molecules, which is a task similar to reassembling one
chapter of a story from a library of torn books.
To access the stored data later, the researchers also encode the
equivalent of zip codes and street addresses into the DNA sequences.
Using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) techniques -- commonly used in
molecular biology -- helps them more easily identify the zip codes they
are looking for. Using DNA sequencing techniques, the researchers can
then "read" the data and convert them back to a video, image or document
file by using the street addresses to reorder the data.
Currently, the largest barrier to viable DNA storage is the cost and
efficiency with which DNA can be synthesized (or manufactured) and
sequenced (or read) on a large scale. But researchers say there's no
technical barrier to achieving those gains if the right incentives are
in place.
Advances in DNA storage rely on techniques pioneered by the
biotechnology industry, but also incorporate new expertise. The team's
encoding approach, for instance, borrows from error correction schemes
commonly used in computer memory -- which hadn't been applied to DNA.
"This is an example where we're borrowing something from nature --
DNA -- to store information. But we're using something we know from
computers -- how to correct memory errors -- and applying that back to
nature," said Ceze.
"This multidisciplinary approach is what makes this project exciting.
We are drawing from a diverse set of disciplines to push the boundaries
of what can be done with DNA. And, as a result, creating a storage
system with unprecedented density and durability," said Karin Strauss, a
researcher at Microsoft and UW affiliate associate professor of
computer science and engineering.
The research was funded by Microsoft Research, the National Science
Foundation, and the David Notkin Endowed Graduate Fellowship.
Co-authors include UW computer science and engineering doctoral
student James Bornholt, UW bio-engineering doctoral student Randolph
Lopez and Douglas Carmean, a partner architect at Microsoft Research and
a UW affiliate professor of computer science and engineering.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Washington.
The original item was written by Jennifer Langston.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
