Data Successfully Stored in DNA
Soft “Ware” for Long Term Data Archives
FUTURE PROOF – BLOG BY FUTURES PLATFORM
Data files have been successfully stored into DNA and extracted from it. According to Wired, researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center have stored a movie, an operating system and other files on DNA molecules. The method is called DNA Fountain.
Stored files in the DNA included the film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, an Amazon gift card and a virus. Mathematically speaking, the DNA Fountain algorithm encodes digital ones and zeros to A, G, C and T. One gram of DNA can contain 215 petabytes of data and have a half-life of 500 years.
FW: Thinking video ”Is DNA the Future of Data Storage?” depicts a likely future of DNA as data storage. At the moment, storing data in DNA is slow and expensive. If bioengineers can develop a fast, reliable and cost-effective way of storing data in DNA, it can become the first storage medium that can last long without data loss, making it ideal for data archives.
What used to be failing hardware can become a reliable, biological “soft” ware.
To learn more about encoding and decoding of data into DNA, see, for example, “A DNA-Based Archival Storage System” by researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research.
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