SOON YOUR DNA WILL BE USED TO STORE MOVIES AND AN OPERATING SYSTEM

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Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature's age-old solution for information-storage -- DNA.

In a new study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA's nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable.

DNA is an ideal storage medium because it's ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from the bones of a 430,000-year-old human ancestor found in a cave in Spain.

"DNA won't degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won't become obsolete " said study coauthor Yaniv Erlich, a computer science professor at Columbia Engineering.

HOW IT WORKS
Erlich and his colleague Dina Zielinski, an associate scientist at NYGC, chose six files to encode, or write, into DNA: a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, "Arrival of a train at La Ciotat," a $50 Amazon gift card, a computer virus, a Pioneer plaque and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon.

They compressed the files into a master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code made up of ones and zeros. Using an erasure-correcting algorithm called fountain codes, they randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, and mapped the ones and zeros in each droplet to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C and T.
 The algorithm deleted letter combinations known to create errors, and added a barcode to each droplet to help reassemble the files later.

To retrieve their files, they used modern sequencing technology to read the DNA strands, followed by software to translate the genetic code back into binary. They recovered their files with zero errors, the study reports.

Cost still remains a barrier. The researchers spent $7,000 to synthesize the DNA they used to archive their 2 megabytes of data, and another $2,000 to read it. Though the price of DNA sequencing has fallen exponentially, there may not be the same demand for DNA synthesis, says Sri Kosuri, a biochemistry professor at UCLA.

But the price of DNA synthesis can be vastly reduced if lower-quality molecules are produced, and coding strategies like DNA Fountain are used to fix molecular errors, says Erlich. "We can do more of the heavy lifting on the computer to take the burden off time-intensive molecular coding," he said.

Sources:

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