Scientists and researchers have been attempting to improve storage systems in response to the exponential growth in data. They’ve discovered a new way to store photographs, files, documents, and information in human DNA by expanding it artificially to hold more data.
DNA is abundant and can store a huge amount of data in a short amount of space. It can also withstand harsh environments, making it perfect for long-term data storage. Scientists can even extract genetic info from DNA that is hundreds of years old.
Kasra Tabatabaei, a co-author and researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology says, “Every day, several petabytes of data are generated on the internet. Only one gram of DNA would be sufficient to store that data. That’s how dense DNA is as a storage medium.”
The research is the first to propose improving DNA for use as a digital data store medium. Tabatabei went on to say, “Imagine the English alphabet. If you only had four letters to use, you could only create so many words. If you had the full alphabet, you could produce limitless word combinations.
That’s the same with DNA. Instead of converting zeroes and ones to A, G, C, and T, we can convert zeroes and ones to A, G, C, T, and the seven new letters in the storage alphabet.”
In simple terms, the regular DNA can be modified to include much more data than before by adding more letters to its sequence and increasing the number of combinations available for storing data.
Another researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and co-author on the study, Chao Pan stated, “We tried 77 different combinations of the 11 nucleotides, and our method was able to differentiate each of them perfectly.
The deep learning framework as part of our method to identify different nucleotides is universal, which enables the generalizability of our approach to many other applications.”
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