Running Out of Hard Drive Space? Use Your DNA.

Running out of space on your hard drive or memory card? Scientists at the University of Washington partnered with Microsoft have discovered a new way of storing electronic information such as pictures or vides, and the method of storage is anything but technological. It is a memory device of a more organic form, DNA. Their successful system allows for the upload, storage and retrieval of digital data using a DNA molecule as the storage device. 

Technological advances are growing everyday and people everywhere are becoming more dependent on technology. The amount of digital data worldwide is expected to hit the trillions within the next five years, so finding a more efficient method of data storage is becoming a crucial issue. DNA can hold data much more efficiently than any technological device. DNA decays at a much lesser rate than any hard drive or memory card, so data can be stored for centuries as opposed to decades. Also DNA can hold an unexpectedly high amount of data, 10,000 gigs to be exact. This large amount of data does not require more than a small amount of DNA for storage, just enough to fill the very bottom of a test tube is plenty to store 10,000 gigs. In this study scientists successfully encoded four photos as nucleotide sequences of synthetic DNA. Once encoded the photos were successfully retrieved in a reverse process from a larger pool of DNA strands. The resulting images were amazingly reconstructed in their entirety, not a single piece was missing. 

This method of data storage seems to be extraordinarily promising, however the scientists do not mention how long data encoding and retrieval takes. As an increasingly impatient species people may be resistant to using this method if storage and retrieval takes days or even just hours to achieve. I am interested to see where the studies on this method go, it seems like a promising method. DNA stores an astonishing amount of genetic information on it, so the thought that I can someday store my thousands of pictures on a DNA molecule is quite intriguing.