Researchers Enhance DNA to Store a Huge Amount of Data

With the exponential rise in data, scientists and researchers have been working towards the betterment of storage devices. They have now found a new method to store photos, files, documents, and information in human DNA, by artificially extending it to contain more data.

DNA can contain a large amount of data in very small spaces and is found abundantly. It can also survive in tough conditions, making it ideal to store data for long periods of time. Scientists can even retrieve genetic data that is centuries old from DNA.

A researcher from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and co-author, Kasra Tabatabaei comments:

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 study is the first to consider enhancing the DNA for use as a storage medium for digital data.

Tabatabei further explained:

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.