The
data stored in a warehouse-sized data centre today would fit into ‘a space
roughly the size of a few board game dice’
Tech
major Microsoft has developed an end-to-end automated DNA storage device
that can translate digital information into DNA and back to bits, the company
said recently.
The
automated system to store and retrieve data in manufactured DNA is a key step
in moving the technology out of the research lab and into commercial data
centres.
The
novel system, developed in partnership with the University of Washington,
translated ‘Hello’ into DNA and converted it back to digital data in just 21
hours, reported the paper published in Nature Scientific Reports journal.
“Our
goal is to put a system into production that, to the end user, looks like any
other cloud storage service — bits are sent to a data centre and stored there
and then they just appear when the customer wants them,” said Karin Strauss,
principal researcher at Microsoft. “To do that, we needed to prove this is
practical from an automation perspective,” Strauss said.
The
system has so far stored one gigabyte of data in DNA, which includes cat
photographs, great literary works, pop videos as well as archival recordings in
DNA, which could be retrieved without errors, the researchers said.
The
automated DNA data storage system uses software that converts the ones and
zeros of digital data into the As, Ts, Cs and Gs that make up the building
blocks of DNA.
When
the system needs to retrieve the information, it adds other chemicals to
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.
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.
