DNA Could Become the Next Big Data Warehouse

Scientists have stored some Shakespearean sonnets and part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech by encoding them in DNA -- a process that could preserve those famous words for millennia. The team at the European Bioinformatics Institute isn't the first to try this new approach to data storage. A Harvard team stored around 700 terabytes of digital data in a single gram of DNA last year.

Researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) on Wednesday announced their success at storing data by encoding it to DNA. The system could stand the test of time -- tens of thousands of years, perhaps.

This method for archiving data could make it possible to store 100 million hours of high-definition video in about a cup of DNA, according to the scientists, and given the trend toward Big Data, that could be a big breakthrough. One gram of DNA could hold as much as information as more than a million CDs.

Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI looking at synthesised DNA. (Credit: EMBL Photolab)

Unlike existing methods of data storage -- all of which have relatively limited life spans -- DNA has proven it can endure, literally, for ages. Like any physical carbon-based object, DNA can be destroyed, but it happens to be far more sturdy than paper or tape, and it can't easily be damaged by electromagnetic fields.

"We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information, because we can extract it from wooly mammoth bones -- which date back tens of thousands of years -- and make sense of it," said Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI. "It's also incredibly small, dense, and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy."

DNA could have an advantage over many current methods of storage.

Although tape is the cheapest storage medium, it's performance is lacking, explained Fang Zhang, storage analyst at IHS iSuppli. Analyzing Big Data using tape would take much longer, compared to SSD and HDD. Depending on how frequently it's used, tape could wear out.

+ While it's highly unlikely that the words of William Shakespeare would ever be lost, 154 of the Bard's sonnets have been spelled out using DNA. An audio file containing part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech has also been encoded.

Being stored in DNA could allow those famous words to live on for eons.

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DNA Could Become the Next Big Data Warehouse