Researcher Discovered To Store The Data in DNA
Yes, you heard right, now store the Data in DNA.
Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington have developed the first fully automated system to store and retrieve data in DNA.
The researchers have successfully encoded the word "Hello" in DNA and converted it back to digital data by using a fully automated end-to-end system.
“Our ultimate goal is to put a system into production that, to the end user, looks very much like any other cloud storage service — bits are sent to a data-center and stored there and then they just appear when the customer wants them,” said Microsoft principal researcher Karin Strauss. “To do that, we needed to prove that this is practical from an automation perspective.”
Information is stored in synthetic DNA molecules created in a lab, not DNA from humans or other living things, and can be encrypted before it is sent to the system. While sophisticated machines such as synthesizers and sequencers already perform key parts of the process, many of the intermediate steps until now have required manual labor in the research lab. But that wouldn’t be viable in a commercial setting, said Chris Takahashi, senior research scientist at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
“You can’t have a bunch of people running around a data-center with pipettes — it’s too prone to human error, it’s too costly and the footprint would be too large,” Takahashi said.
How Data Storage in DNA Works?
The process works in automated DNA data storage system uses software developed by the Microsoft and UW team that converts the ones and zeros of digital data into the As, Ts, Cs and Gs that make up the building blocks of DNA. Then it uses inexpensive, largely off-the-shelf lab equipment to flow the necessary liquids and chemicals into a synthesizer that builds manufactured snippets of DNA and to push them into a storage vessel.
When the system needs to retrieve the information, it adds other chemicals to properly prepare the DNA and uses microfluidic pumps to push the liquids into other parts of the system that “read” the DNA sequences and convert it back to information that a computer can understand.
The goal of the project was not to prove how fast or inexpensively the system could work, researchers say, but simply to demonstrate that automation is possible.
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Source: Microsoft