DNA 'perfect for digital storage'

[frigidmagi]

bbc

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data.

The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".

The information was then read back out with 100% accuracy.

It is possible to store huge volumes of data in DNA for thousands of years, the researchers write in Nature magazine.

They acknowledge that the costs involved in synthesizing the molecule in the lab make this type of information storage "breathtakingly expensive" at the moment, but argue that newer, faster technologies will soon make it much more affordable, especially for long-term archiving.

"One of the great properties of DNA is that you don't need any electricity to store it," explained team-member Dr Ewan Birney from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, near Cambridge.

"If you keep it cold, dry and dark - DNA lasts for a very long time. We know that because we routinely sequence woolly mammoth DNA that is kept by chance in those sorts of conditions." Mammoth remains are many thousands of years old.

The group cites government and historical records as examples of data that could benefit from the molecular storage option.

Much of this information is not required every day but still needs to be kept. Once encoded in DNA, it could be put away safely in a vault until it was needed.


The coding used the same four "letters", or bases, but in a language living cells would not understand
And unlike other storage media presently in use such as hard disk-drives and magnetic tapes, the DNA "library" would not demand constant maintenance.

In addition, the universality of the life molecule means there would probably never be a backwards-compatibility issue where the technology of the day was incapable of reading the vault's archives.

"We think there will always be DNA-reading technology so long as there is DNA-based life around on Earth, assuming it is technologically sophisticated of course," Dr Birney told BBC News.

This is not the first time that DNA has been used to encode the sort of routine information we keep on our computers.

Last year, for example, an American group published the results of a very similar experiment in Science Magazine. The Boston researchers laid down a whole book in DNA.

The EBI study uses slightly different techniques to achieve its goals, but has also looked deeper into some of the issues of scalability and practicality.

Underpinning all these approaches is the exploitation of the nucleobase sequence at the heart of DNA.

The helical molecule is famously held together by four chemical groups, or nucleobases, which, when arranged in a specific order, carry the genetic instructions needed by a living organism to build and maintain itself.

The EBI storage system uses the same four "letters" but in a completely different "language" to the one understood by life.

To copy a computer file, such as a text document, the binary digits (zeros and ones) that would ordinarily represent that information on a hard drive first have to be translated into the team's bespoke code. A standard DNA synthesis machine then churns out the corresponding sequence.


The digital photo of the European Bioinformatics Institute that was encoded in the DNA
But it is not one long molecule. Rather, it is multiple copies of overlapping fragments, with each fragment also carrying some indexing details that identify where in the overall sequence it should sit.

This builds redundancy into the system, meaning that if some fragments become corrupted, the data will not be lost.

Again, the same standard equipment used in molecular biology labs to read the DNA of organisms is used to pull out the information so that it can be displayed on a computer screen once more.

For its experiment, the EBI team encoded a 26-second snippet of Martin Luther King's classic anti-racism address from 1963, a ".jpg" photo of the EBI (see right); a ".pdf" of the seminal 1953 paper by Crick and Watson describing the structure of DNA, ".txt" file containing all of Shakespeare's sonnets; and a file about the encoding system itself (a total equivalent on a computer drive to about 760 kilobytes).

Physically, the DNA carrying all that information is no bigger than a speck of dust.

Team member Nick Goldman said the molecule was an incredibly dense storage medium. One gram of DNA ought to be able to hold about two petabytes of data, he added - the equivalent of about three million CDs.

Dr Goodman addressed the concern some people might have that artificial DNA code could somehow go wild and end up in the genome of another living organism.

"The DNA we've created can't be incorporated accidently into a genome; it uses a completely different code to what the cells of living bodies use," he explained.

"And if you did end up with any of this DNA inside you, it would just be degraded and disposed of. It really has no place in a living being."

[LadyTevar]

Maybe that's how the Archive works in Dresden LOL

More seriously, this would be epic.

[Josh]

"And if you did end up with any of this DNA inside you, it would just be degraded and disposed of. It really has no place in a living being."

Way to shit on a million science fiction plots with your reality, guys.

[Batman]

I'm not sure I buy the 'no backwards compatibility problems' nor why the information lasting forever is such a big deal (a lot if not most information becomes pretty much irrelevant on short notice, and we seem to have adequate storage arrangements for the part somebody feels we ought to keep), but assuming this can be made not ridiculously expensive, the sheer information density is worth it.
And I totally don't hate to tell you Josh, but your body does that pretty much on a daily basis. It's called your immune system at work.
Why? That terminated a story idea of yours? And since when did 'Um-that actually wouldn't work in the real world' ever stopped SciFi authors?

[Josh]

I'm not sure I buy the 'no backwards compatibility problems' nor why the information lasting forever is such a big deal (a lot if not most information becomes pretty much irrelevant on short notice, and we seem to have adequate storage arrangements for the part somebody feels we ought to keep), but assuming this can be made not ridiculously expensive, the sheer information density is worth it.
And I totally don't hate to tell you Josh, but your body does that pretty much on a daily basis. It's called your immune system at work.
Why? That terminated a story idea of yours? And since when did 'Um-that actually wouldn't work in the real world' ever stopped SciFi authors?

Actually, it kills other stories that have already been done, which is probably why they made a point of saying it wouldn't work. Still, I might've used it someday. MIGHT STILL, ALRIGHT?

As for when it's stopped authors, it really depends on the flavor of science fiction. Hard science fiction writers try to keep things within the realm of what we currently know is possible, while space opera is virtually fantasy in space with technology in place of magic.

Not saying that either form is superior/inferior, I enjoy them both. But a lot of hard science fiction writers take their shit seriously- Larry Niven's first short story went with what was the prevailing thought in 1964, specifically the notion that Mercury is a tide-locked world. When they then proceeded to discover that Mercury isn't quite tide-locked, he wrote the editor and asked if they wanted him to run a retraction/apology for the scientific error in the story.

[Norseman]

Look on the bright side Josh, you can now use "Do you want a 3 terrabyte data infusion?" as a pickup line.

[Josh]

Look on the bright side Josh, you can now use "Do you want a 3 terrabyte data infusion?" as a pickup line.

...I already tried that. Despite the fact that it looks like a sure bet as a pickup line, field testing gave the following results in ten instances.

6 instances of quizzical looks.
3 instances of "I'm waiting for somebody."
1 instance of a drink being thrown in the tester's face.

[Batman]

I guess it depends on what you want from Science Fiction. Me, I have no problem with the early Heinlein, Asimov or Hamilton novels using a solar system that, as it turns out, never existed. They were fiction, and mostly, they were fun fiction (though Heinlein should have made up his mind-you either write SciFi or porn, and if you're writing porn, you're doing it all wrong). I'm a Wars/Trek/B5/for Valen's sake superhero comics fan. I believe in people who can casually benchpress a planet on solar power.

[Josh]

I guess it depends on what you want from Science Fiction. Me, I have no problem with the early Heinlein, Asimov or Hamilton novels using a solar system that, as it turns out, never existed. They were fiction, and mostly, they were fun fiction (though Heinlein should have made up his mind-you either write SciFi or porn, and if you're writing porn, you're doing it all wrong). I'm a Wars/Trek/B5/for Valen's sake superhero comics fan. I believe in people who can casually benchpress a planet on solar power.

It's all in taste. One of the stories that has really stuck with me through my entire life was a hard science fiction I read when I was about seven or eight. It was about astronauts on a lunar base, and it was (as I recall all these years later) a fairly straightforward 'men in danger' survival story and I've never forgotten it.

On the other hand, I'm also perfectly cool with Laumer's Bolo series with massive battletanks massing at around the weight of a modern-day battlecruiser zipping around shooting shit up while having all the warm fuzzy affection of a dog for their pilots. (While also being smarter than any human who ever lived.)

(They have anti-grav to nullify some of their weight, hence why they can actually, you know, drive around.)

[Batman]

It's all in does your story hold together. Heinlein and Asimov and Hamilton an Clarke and so on still work because despite the fact that they were wrong about the way the laws of physics work and the layout of the universe, if you accept their (since then verified to be incorrect) assumptions on the workings of said universe, the narrative still works.

[Josh]

It's all in does your story hold together. Heinlein and Asimov and Hamilton an Clarke and so on still work because despite the fact that they were wrong about the way the laws of physics work and the layout of the universe, if you accept their (since then verified to be incorrect) assumptions on the workings of said universe, the narrative still works.

Definitely. The wisdom of today is the folly of tomorrow. That's the beauty of the process and a reminder as to why we shouldn't cling to dogma or be so damned self-important.