I thought I might have shared these before, but I can't seem to find them. Either way, at least this information is being shared.
- Scientists claim big advance in using DNA to store data
- It's in the genes – data storage turns to DNA
BBC
Scientists claim big advance in using DNA to store data
1/12/2021
Image source - Science Photo Library
If stored as DNA, every film ever made could be stored in a space smaller than a sugar cube
Scientists say they have made a major step forward in efforts to store information as molecules of DNA, which are more compact and long-lasting than other options. The magnetic hard drives we currently currently to store computer data can take up lots of space and they have to be replaced over time. Using life's preferred storage medium to back up our precious data would allow vast amounts of information to be archived in tiny molecules.
The data would also last thousands of years, according to scientists. A team in Atlanta, US, has now developed a chip that they say could improve on existing forms of DNA storage by a factor of 100. "The density of features on our new chip is [approximately] 100x higher than current commercial devices", Nicholas Guise, senior research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), told BBC News. "So once we add all the control electronics - which is what we're doing over the next year of the programme - we expect something like a 100x improvement over existing technology for DNA data storage."
The technology works by growing unique strands of DNA one building block at a time. These building blocks are known as bases - four distinct chemical units that make up the DNA molecule. They are - adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.
Image source - Sean McNeil
The microchip will be used for growing multiple strands of DNA in parallel
The bases can then be used to encode information, in a way that's analogous to the strings of ones and zeroes (binary code) that carry data in traditional computing. There are different potential ways to store this information in DNA - for example, a zero in binary code could be represented by the bases adenine or cytosine and a one might be represented by guanine or thymine. Alternatively, a one and zero could be mapped to just two of the four bases.
Scientists have said that, if formatted in DNA, every film ever made could fit inside a volume smaller than a sugar cube. Given how compact and reliable it is, it's not surprising there is now broad interest in DNA as the next medium for archiving data that needs to be kept indefinitely. The structures on the chip used to grow the DNA are called microwells and are a few hundred nanometres deep - less than the thickness of a sheet of paper. The current prototype microchip is about 2.5cm (one-inch) square and includes multiple microwells, allowing several DNA strands to be synthesised in parallel. This will allow larger amounts of DNA to be grown in a shorter space of time.
How DNA can be used to store computer data
MICROCHIP?! - Scientists claim big advance in using DNA to store data
https://www.bitchute.com/video/03KtyvgmT1ie
Because it's a prototype, not all the microwells are wired up yet. This means the total amount of DNA data that can be written with this particular chip is currently less-than what leading synthesis companies can produce on commercial chips; however, Dr Guise explained that when everything's up and running that will change. The current record for DNA digital data storage is around 200MB, with single synthesis runs lasting about 24 hours, but the new technology could write 100 times more DNA data in the same amount of time.
The high cost of DNA storage has so far restricted the technology to "boutique customers", such as those seeking to archive information in time capsules. The team at GTRI believes their work could help reshape the cost curve. It has partnered with two California biotech companies to make a commercially-viable demonstration of the technology - Twist Bioscience and Roswell Biotechnologies.
Image source - Sean McNeil
GTRI's Nicholas Guise tests electronics on the microchip
DNA data storage won't initially replace server farms for information that must be accessed quickly and often. Because of the time required for reading the sequence, the technique would be most useful for information that must be kept available for a long time, but accessed infrequently. This type of data is currently stored on magnetic tapes which should be replaced around every 10 years. With DNA, however, "as long as you keep the temperature low enough, the data will survive for thousands of years, so the cost of ownership drops to almost zero", Dr Guise explained.
"It only costs much money to write the DNA once at the beginning and then to read the DNA at the end. If we can get the cost of this technology competitive with the cost of writing data magnetically, the cost of storing and maintaining information in DNA over many years should be lower."
DNA storage has a higher error rate than conventional hard drive storage. In collaboration with the University of Washington, GTRI researchers have come up with a way of identifying and correcting those errors.The work has been backed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which supports science geared towards overcoming challenges relevant to the US intelligence community.
Related
Scientists write film into bacterial DNA
https://archive.ph/DsP8F
https://archive.ph/gXuLo
"life's
preferred storage medium"?
"so the cost of ownership drops to almost zero" - so after you've been buried (not cremated), then you are owned by the state or by a commercial business. The cost would be nearly 0, because maintenance would be required. Hmmm...
The Matrix? The lie in that film series is that the victims are... well, barely alive.
ec.europa.eu
It's in the genes – data storage turns to DNA
22 April 2013
"It's in your genes!" How often have you been reminded by friends or relatives that you look the way you do because of the genetic code stored in your DNA? The next time you hear this expression used, you might stop to wonder what else could be stored in those genes.
Nick Goldman is a scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute at Cambridge in the UK ©EMBL
According to the latest research to come out of the Cambridge-based European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), DNA is capable of more than just storing genetic information alone - it also has the potential to store massive volumes of man-made data. The research is now getting EU funding that could go towards refining the technique so that it could be scaled up to store all of the data that exists on Earth – estimated to be three zettabytes, or 3 000 billion billion bytes – which, for those who don't think in 'bytes', is roughly equivalent to a pile of 750 billion DVDs. In the future, a cup of DNA could store 100 million hours of video.
Storing information in a miniscule form that cuts down on space and does away with the need for energy guzzling and costly hard disks would be a timely innovation in the digital age. As more and more data is generated, the need for economical and durable forms of data storage also rises. It was this pressing issue that prompted the key authours of the EBI research project, Nick Goldman and EBI Associate Director Ewan Birney, to act.
"At the Institute, we share biological data with other scientists to improve their insights into life", said Goldman. "We add value to it and send it back into the research community via the Internet, but we realised that, as the volume of biological data we receive grows exponentially, our budget to handle and store it does not. Disks are expensive. We needed to find a way of storing large volumes of data in a small space, cheaply – and ensure that it could be retrieved efficiently."
The pair hit upon their approach to resolving the problem three years ago. "Ewan and I were chatting one evening after a work conference in Hamburg. We were joking about, thrashing out ideas for alternative data storage methods, and then, after we’d batted a few ideas back and forth, we just turned to each other and said, 'How about using DNA?'."
Much of the funding for such research at the non-profit EBI comes from the European Union, under the Directorate-General Research & Innovation's Sixth and Seventh Framework Programmes. In 2012, the Institute received EUR 7.3 million from the European Commission.
Before they started, Goldman and Birney put together a project research team at the EBI, which forms part of the EU-wide European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). They also enlisted another actor – Agilent Technologies, a California-based biomedical technologies company with expertise in writing DNA – to complete the research network. "Agilent saw it as a challenge and a fun piece of research", says Goldman. "They provided the required DNA samples to us for free."
Shall I compare thee to a DNA?
"We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths, which date back tens of thousands of years, and still make sense of it. It is also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy", Goldman said.
The experiment to see if they could actually use DNA to store information took place in three stages:
1. First up were the EBI team. "Our role was to invent a DNA code into which digital information could be translated", said Goldman. Typically, a file on a computer hard disk is stored in binary code, comprising zeros and ones. The computer ‘knows’ the rules of the code and translates the information it receives accordingly. It was up to the EBI team to rewrite the binary code into a DNA sequence on a computer file.
The coding system of DNA – or deoxyribonucleic acid – is built on four nitrogen bases, identified by the letters A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine) and T (thymine). The trick was to write a DNA sequence where the same letters were never repeated. One way of decreasing the risk of errors was to write only short strings of DNA.
"We figured - let’s break up the code into lots of overlapping fragments going in both directions, with indexing information showing where each fragment belongs in the overall code, and make a coding scheme that doesn’t allow repeats. That way, you would have to have the same error on four different fragments for it to fail – and that would be very rare", Birney said.
2. Once they had their DNA sequence design in place, they used it to encode an MP3 clip of Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech, a photo of the EMBL-EBI lab, an image of the famous DNA double helix structure as identified by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, and a text file of all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets. The encoded computer files were flown to Dr Emily Leproust of Agilent Technologies in California. "We downloaded the files from the web and used them to synthesise hundreds of thousands of pieces of DNA. The result looks like a tiny speck of dust", Leproust said.
During the synthesis process, Agilent manufactured DNA that matched the DNA sequence sent to them by the EBI. Using technology that is a bit like an inkjet printer, they fired the encoded DNA in the form of miniscule droplets onto a microscope's glass slide. The fluid was then freeze-dried and the resulting speck of dust containing 739 kilobytes of data was flown back to Cambridge.
3. Reconstituted in water, the substance was shipped on to the EMBL’s Heidelberg office in Germany, where it was read back by sequencing machinery and the digital information reconstructed with 100 percent accuracy, the researchers said. The EBI exists in large part thanks to funds received from the EMBL's 20 member states, but Goldman sees EU funding as playing a vital indirect role in expanding its work. "In this research project, for example, we really benefited from being able to call on team members whose skills had been honed on schemes funded by the EU and who could assist in data analysis and data modelling. Sometimes, of course, the EBI gains essential hardware through funding, but here it was the EU's 'investment in people' that counted for us."
More of a long-term thing
So, do the results of their research mean the end of the hard disk? Not quite yet. At the moment, the team sees its main application as storing information that needs to be archived for a long period of time and accessed on an infrequent basis.
"From a cost point of view, DNA data storage really comes in to its own over the long-term", says Goldman. "The one-off cost for DNA sequencing is still very high, but once that expenditure has been made, it becomes a very cheap way of archiving information. With DNA, maintenance costs are minimal as the cost of endlessly re-transferring information from one outdated medium to another – such as video tape to CD – can be dispensed with. It costs virtually nothing to store and - unlike video tape which degrades rapidly with time - lasts thousands of years."
People will start using DNA to store data within the next 50 years, Goldman believes, as the cost of DNA sequencing goes down. "Right now, I could see it as providing an excellent way of storing data that is now held on magnetic tapes – it's not impossible to imagine that those vast dusty archives of tapes, whose corridors are currently patrolled by data retrieval robots, could be done away with once and for all with our method."
More info
European Bioinformatics Institute
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Agilent Technologies
https://archive.ph/W6947
"'Shall I compare thee to
a' DNA"?
"At the Institute, we share biological data with other scientists to improve their insights into life"
Trust a... erm... gold-standard... peughmann to share personal information with companies.
Does anyone think this European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) are attempting to get an EMBLem - or provide one for others to follow?
You have to love dirty morals and ethics!
"So, do the results of their research mean the end of the hard disk? Not quite yet."
Of course not. People would not accept it. Things have to be done slowly, over time, to help people not think about things properly while they're distracted by other things, and to ease them into things instead.
