DNA Storage. What do you think?
Hi,
In my presentation i said that i am IT lovers. So i just read an article published by Microsoft that said DNA Storage.
The principle of operation is complex, but follows the rules already set by nature: DNA contains molecules that have instructions on how living systems, scientists do nothing more than replace this information with digital data, photos, videos and documents.
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Initially the digital data ( In binary code, 0 an 1) are translated into the letters of the four basic nucleotides of DNA: adenosine, cytosine, guanosine and thymidine. At that point the letters (even in digital format) are stored inside the molecules and merge along the DNA strings.
Microsoft and UW team managed to impress on DNA strings the high-definition video "This Too Shall Pass", the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages and the first 100 books of the Project Guttenberg.
The DNA has many advantages: it is compact, dense and is preserved over time but the real problem is synthesizing time (encoding) and sequence (decoding) data.
So what do you think ?
I hope this article is interesting for someone and please let me know your opinion.
Thanks for reading
A problem with DNA is that it will degrade. DNA degradation means that the stuff just breaks in peaces. You will need a high redundancy to recover the original information by de nove assembly of the pieces.
In addition, nature has provided us with various tools for reading the DNA information (enzymes), and replicating existing pieces of DNA, but lacks a mechanism for writing new DNA. Chemistry has come up with answers in this respect, but creation of large accurate molecules is still a challenge. It is of-course advised to store the information in small pieces, because then it is less prone to degradation as well.
I am sure technical improvements will resolve these problems, so I foresee that DNA data storage will become a big thing in the future!