In the last few years, humanity has produced more data than has ever been collected in all of history, and it looks like it will continue to grow exponentially. Of course, this being the case, one question comes to everyone’s mind at some point: Where are we going to store all this information?
Although scientists are constantly increasing the size of hard disks to store human data, and some even believe that this can be done forever, there is a part of us who believes that these efforts will be insufficient compared to our superior data generation speed. In response to this concern, scientists are now trying to come up with a ‘unique’ solution: storing files, photos and documents in nature’s unique database, DNA.
Just one gram of DNA is enough to store a few petabytes of information
The study, published last month in the scientific journal Nano Letters, has the potential to take the concept of DNA data storage to great heights. . In fact, the team behind the study was the first to artificially expand the DNA alphabet, which could enable massive storage capacities and accommodate extremely extreme digital data.
The double helix strands in DNA, which is large and dense enough to contain an unbelievable amount of data in hyper-small spaces, are crammed into the cell nucleus, which is only 10 micrometers wide. The fact that it can withstand even harsh conditions means that DNA is actually the perfect memory for the preservation of information. Speaking on this subject, researcher Kasra Tabatabaei from the Beckman Institute of Advanced Sciences and Technology, co-author of the study, said, “A few petabytes of data are produced on the Internet every day. Only one gram of DNA will be enough to store this data. DNA is that dense as a storage medium.” saves as.
DNA encodes the genetic information of all living things using only four ‘letters’
So, from a biological point of view, how does DNA collect data? Namely, DNA encodes genetic information thanks to four different molecules called nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (S) and thymine (T). In a way, it can be said that DNA is a 4-letter alphabet consisting of letters representing these four molecules, and different letter combinations represent different bits of data. This means that nature encodes the genetic information of all living things on earth using only these four letters. Technically speaking, that means we should be able to store a ton of digital data, too, through the letters in DNA.
But what if this alphabet consisted of more than four letters? If that were the case, the data storage capacity would have been much, much greater, which is exactly what the team was trying to do.
Explaining this situation based on the alphabet we use for writing and stating that if we only had 4 letters, the number of words we could produce would be very limited, Tabatabei said, “If you have the whole alphabet, you can produce unlimited word combinations. Same thing with DNA. Instead of converting zeros and ones to A, G, C, and T, we can convert zeros and ones to A, G, C, T and seven new letters in the storage alphabet.”
In addition, the researchers developed a mechanism that allows data to be detected and transmitted back
In addition, the researchers have fully read back the synthetic DNA’s data, allowing the information encoded with these 11 letters to be transferred back on demand. They’ve also developed a new mechanism, which allows DNA’s letter combinations to be read extremely clearly, reportedly using deep learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to distinguish between man-made DNA letters and natural ones, and to tell everything apart.
Chao Pan, a graduate student from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, one of the co-authors of the study, said, “77 different combinations of 11 nucleotides” regarding the mechanism. “The deep learning framework that is part of our method for identifying different nucleotides is universal, which makes our approach generalizable to many other applications,” he says.
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