DNA Storage for Your Hard Drive

By Ilya Rzhevskiy Epoch Times Staff Created: February 7, 2013 Last Updated: February 7, 2013

An employee walks past servers in one of four server rooms at the new Facebook Data Center on April 19 in Forest City, N.C. DNA storage could replace massive server farms, such as those used by Facebook, with a single hard drive that could fit in your pocked. (Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty Images)

Thanks to a lively discussion one evening in a pub, two scientists have come up with a way to store any type of data, from PDFs to MP3 files, into strands of DNA. The new method works without electricity and can store information for thousands of years. It is like the DNA of dinosaurs that died out millions of years ago, which preserved the information of the species and their characteristics since the Jurassic age.

We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information, because we can extract it from wooly mammoth boneswhich date back tens of thousands of yearsand make sense of it, said Nick Goldman, one of the scientists who made the discovery. Its also incredibly small, dense, and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy.

We downloaded the files from the Web and used them to synthesize hundreds of thousands of pieces of DNAthe result looks like a tiny piece of dust.

The two scientists, Nick Goldman and Ewen Birney, both from the European Bioinformatics Institute, admit that it was totally an accidental discovery that happened after they drank a few beers in a pub.

We realized that DNA itself is a really efficient way of storing information. So over a second beer, we started to write on napkins and sketch out some details of how that might be made to work, Goldman says.

The method basically works by converting the 0s and 1s used in a binomial computer code into the letters of genetic code A, C, G, Tthe four nucleotides. The various combinations of those four letters can be used to record and encode just about anything from a word document to the entire characteristic of the human beings physical body that requires just 3 billion of those letters arranged in a specific combination, compactly pressed deep into each cell of our bodies.

To start off with a nucleotide combination a bit easier than a human body, the scientists picked Shakespeares sonnets as a PDF file and Martin Luther Kings speech I Have a Dream in MP3 format and sent those off to the labs of Agilent Technologiesa biotech company, where the files got synthesized into a strand of DNA.

We downloaded the files from the Web and used them to synthesize hundreds of thousands of pieces of DNAthe result looks like a tiny piece of dust, explained Emily Leproust of Agilent Technologies.

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DNA Storage for Your Hard Drive