DNA DATA Storage - solution for information overload
The world will generate 160 zettabytes of data in 2025. That’s more bytes than there are stars in the observable universe. Conventional storage media like flash-drives and hard-drives do not have the longevity, data density, or cost efficiency to meet the global demand.
1 of 4: why store Data on dna?
2 of 4: DNA storage: 200 megabytes of data on the molecular strands
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Hundreds of years from now, today’s DVDs, web servers, and flash drives will all be long dead. But one copy of a music video for alternative rock band OK Go’s song "This Too Shall Pass" could still be playing. The Rube Goldberg-inspired video is part of a 202-megabyte cache of data that Microsoft and the University of Washington say they’ve written to DNA storage — the largest known DNA storage trove created to date. The idea has been in the proof of concept stage for years, and so far, the information stored has been modest. In 2012, Harvard Medical School researchers stored a digital book in DNA. In 2013, the European Bioinformatics Institute copied 739 kilobytes of sound, images, and text, including a 26-second audio clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech. More recently, Harvard Medical School and a Technicolor research group reported storing and retrieving 22 megabytes that included French silent film A Trip to the Moon. This new work builds on previous efforts, and — possibly — marks another move toward a technology that could have real-world applications. In order to write data to DNA, researchers translate the binary code of a file into the nucleotide molecules that form DNA’s building blocks, assigning different base pairs to represent ones and zeroes. In this case, Twist Bioscience created custom strings of DNA based on the resulting patterns, encoding the OK Go video, copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in different languages, the top 100 books from Project Gutenberg, and the Crop Trust seed database. Every teacher's go-to video for teaching Rube Goldberg machines is the first music video stored in strings of
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