Researchers Use DNA to Store 'The Wizard of Oz' - Translated Into Esperanto (popularmechanics.com) 74
"DNA is millions of times more efficient at storing data than your laptop's magnetic hard drive," reports Popular Mechanics.
"Since DNA can store data far more densely than silicon, you could squeeze all of the data in the world inside just a few grams of it." In a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ilya Finkelstein, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and company detail their new error correction method... They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz, translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We're on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are certainly not the first to have encoded a work of art onto strands of DNA... [A] team of researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington fit 200 megabytes of data onto lengths of DNA, including the entirety of War and Peace. In March 2019, they even came up with the first automated system for storing and retrieving data in the manufactured genetic material. Today, other major technology firms are also working in the space, including both IBM and Google. The ultra-secretive U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity — the government's version of DARPA, but for spies — is even invested in the work. These researchers envision a future where some of the most precious, but rarely accessed data, can be stored in vials of DNA, only pulled down from the cool, dark storage of the lab, as needed....
Because there are four building blocks in DNA, rather than the binary 1s and 0s in magnetic hard drives, the genetic storage method is far more dense, explains John Hawkins, another co-author of the new paper. "A teaspoon of DNA contains so much data it would require about 10 Walmart Supercenter-sized data centers to store using current technology," he tells Popular Mechanics. "Or, as some people like to put it, you could fit the entire internet in a shoe box." Not only that, but DNA is future-proof. Hawkins recalls when CDs were the dominant storage method, back in the 1990s, and they held the promise that their storage could last forever, because plastic does (but scratches can be devastating). Data stored on DNA, on the other hand, can last for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there is a whole field of science called archaeogenetics that explores the longevity of DNA to understand the ancient past... DNA storage doesn't require any energy, either — just a cool, dark place to hang out until someone decides to access it. But the greatest advantage, Hawkins says, is that our ability to read and write DNA will never become obsolete....
But like all data storage methods, DNA has a few shortcomings as well. The most significant upfront hurdle is cost. Hawkins says that current methods are similar to the cost for an Apple Hard Disk 20 back in 1980. Back then, about 20 megabytes of storage — or the amount of data you'd need to use to download a 15-minute video — went for about $1,500.
"Since DNA can store data far more densely than silicon, you could squeeze all of the data in the world inside just a few grams of it." In a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ilya Finkelstein, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and company detail their new error correction method... They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz, translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We're on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are certainly not the first to have encoded a work of art onto strands of DNA... [A] team of researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington fit 200 megabytes of data onto lengths of DNA, including the entirety of War and Peace. In March 2019, they even came up with the first automated system for storing and retrieving data in the manufactured genetic material. Today, other major technology firms are also working in the space, including both IBM and Google. The ultra-secretive U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity — the government's version of DARPA, but for spies — is even invested in the work. These researchers envision a future where some of the most precious, but rarely accessed data, can be stored in vials of DNA, only pulled down from the cool, dark storage of the lab, as needed....
Because there are four building blocks in DNA, rather than the binary 1s and 0s in magnetic hard drives, the genetic storage method is far more dense, explains John Hawkins, another co-author of the new paper. "A teaspoon of DNA contains so much data it would require about 10 Walmart Supercenter-sized data centers to store using current technology," he tells Popular Mechanics. "Or, as some people like to put it, you could fit the entire internet in a shoe box." Not only that, but DNA is future-proof. Hawkins recalls when CDs were the dominant storage method, back in the 1990s, and they held the promise that their storage could last forever, because plastic does (but scratches can be devastating). Data stored on DNA, on the other hand, can last for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there is a whole field of science called archaeogenetics that explores the longevity of DNA to understand the ancient past... DNA storage doesn't require any energy, either — just a cool, dark place to hang out until someone decides to access it. But the greatest advantage, Hawkins says, is that our ability to read and write DNA will never become obsolete....
But like all data storage methods, DNA has a few shortcomings as well. The most significant upfront hurdle is cost. Hawkins says that current methods are similar to the cost for an Apple Hard Disk 20 back in 1980. Back then, about 20 megabytes of storage — or the amount of data you'd need to use to download a 15-minute video — went for about $1,500.
Re:Your download is ready miss. (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, they can store it just fine, but can they READ it, with 100% accuracy yet? Wake me when that happens please. Wake me again when they can read it without destroying the only copy...
Not enough (Score:1)
Ah, but how much porn can be store in a DNA drive?
Not enough. Just sayin'.
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Computer virus? (Score:2)
I'd be worried about some random text or program turning out to be the next super-virus. How are you going to encapsulate the DNA?
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My storage array has cancer...
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Considering many existing human viruses are from about 10 kilobases of nucleic acids (RNA virus genomes are small) and up to only a couple hundred. It has been trivially possible to make enough RNA or DNA to do that since the 1990s. As for a super virus, we can't even make viral capsids that can transfect cancer cells efficiently, so we have a lot of time to go until we can panic about super viruses better than the nature's ones (by which time we'll have the tech to cure them quickly).
In fact, many of the v
Comparison a bit out of date (Score:3)
"Because there are four building blocks in DNA, rather than the binary 1s and 0s in magnetic hard drives, the genetic storage method is far more dense, explains John Hawkins, another co-author of the new paper."
QLC Flash stores 16 levels of information in a single "bit". That's what gives you 1TB micro SD cards.
The biggest mechanical hard drives are about 20TB. You could put a lot more than 20 Micro SD cards in the same space.
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I've seen some experimental drives where they crammed a bunch of SSD cards into a 3.5" sized drive to get 400+TB of storage. Since SSD cards can now hold 1TB, it doesn't seem impossible to connect as many as can fit into a regular sized drive for some insane capacity. Of course, the ability to read/write to all that data is a timely fashion is a different hurdle. Still, a raided array the size of a toaster that can hold 3PB could be appealing to certain group of people, especially if it can be relatively af
"Getting past the errors" (Score:1)
Can't blame /. editors for this error, but can blame them for not noticing it:
From TFA:
Getting Past the Errors
Hawkins says that current methods are similar to the cost for an Apple Hard Disk 20 back in 1980.
"Hello, 1980, this is 1985 calling, we want our brand-new Apple Hard Disk 20 back."
I'm curious (Score:2)
Is this what is usually called "junk DNA"? I.e. stuff encoded in DNA that nobody has found any use for?
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Yes. All the world's literature is stored in there, only nobody has really looked at it yet so it's not yet called 'literature DNA.'
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There is no such thing as junk DNA. So when you hear that term, just know you heard "we don't understand or know" instead.
Science has very often considered things to be Junk or Unnecessary only to find out later... there was a use for it.
Hell they only just recently found a new ligament in the body...
https://www.livescience.com/40... [livescience.com]
When people tear their ACL's this ligament has been missed as needing to be repaired until it's discovery.
Humans have a supremely bad habit of assuming shit is worthless if the
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I have never heard of anyone in science actually assuming that junk DNA was useless -- it is usually and has for a long time been referred to as non-coding regions. I have a feeling that contrary to the reports that David Corning coined the phrase in 1972, the media actually came up with it and then he started using it because that was the only way to dumb things down for idiots. Kind of pathetic for you to insult scientists when scientists are the ones who discovered DNA, both the coding regions and the n
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I proved it in my citation FROM THE YEAR 1972 .. that scientists didn't believe "junk dna" was useless.
THEY HAVE ALWAYS SAID IT SERVED A PURPOSE. I PROVED THAT, WITH A QUOTE FROM 1972.
So quit waving a dictionary in my face, the definition doesn't matter. The FACT is that no scientist (granted you may find an idiot here and there), let alone a consensus, ever felt "junk dna" served no purpose.
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Then you don't use the word "junk".
Why is that so hard to do? Can we get you "pseudo-intellectuals" to use words that have meanings that have been decided on for a long time now?
And remember what I said earlier. Just because they are "scientists" does not suddenly magic them from being still human, making mistakes and creating misunderstanding because they can't be bothered to pick up a dictionary.
"So quit waving a dictionary in my face, the definition doesn't matter."
Your stupidity already told us that t
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As predicted... got down modded for telling the truth.
And yet the person has already admitted that they think the dictionary does not matter and remains unmodded.
Ignorance and Stupidity are celebrated here.
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Latin is all junk. I know because I can't read it.
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Your junk is defined by the Y chromosome.
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Not really. The SRY gene triggers a chain of events that turns your vagina into a penis, but the coding for it is elsewhere. Everyone starts out with a vagina.
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Yes, really, the Y chromosome.
Sure, there are further processes underneath all the way down to the quantum level, but it doesn't change the fact. And since we don't yet fully understand the human DNA is any attempt at a further explanation risky and vague. I do see you remembering vaginas though. Good on you!
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The same DNA code covers both. Which shape it grows into depends on your testosterone levels at around week 6 of pregnancy. The SRY gene triggers the chain of events that starts the testosterone production to turn it into a penis. Sometimes, in about 1.6% of women, it fails due to code elsewhere or environmental factors. Sometimes, in about 0.01% of men who don’t have a Y chromosome, something else can trigger the testosterone production.
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That's what they gotta mean with the 5' end.
A bit misleading (Score:3)
So DNA has 4 symbols instead of 2. That accounts for at most a factor of 2 in storage density. So DNA's storage density has far more to do with other factors than the mere fact of having more symbols.
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So DNA has 4 symbols instead of 2. That accounts for at most a factor of 2 in storage density. So DNA's storage density has far more to do with other factors than the mere fact of having more symbols.
Isn't that a factor of 3? But anyway, you're still right, it's the fact the bases are so tiny and remain stable so a mindbogglingly large number of bases can chain together and still be in such a tiny space.
I'm not a DNA expert, or even a DNA amateur, but isn't it the case that the 4 bases in DNA only combine into two pairs?
That is the A-C-G-T symbols only combine as A-T or C-G. This implies it is still base 2.
But I also remember, from here on slashdot actually, scientists finding other bases that can be
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Let me know if I'm forgetting some other factor.
Yes, additional base pairs could be used to further improve data density.
On the other part, I almost made the same mistake, but the fact that the bases only appear in pairs doesn't matter, since it's the sequence that encodes the information, and any sequence can contain both pairs in both orientations:
A-T, T-A, C-G, G-C. So it's still base 4. (unless f
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Yes, I was mistaken on the factor of three. I originally thought any of the 4 bases could combine, giving 16 possible values/combos.
But that isn't the case.
As you said, A only binds with T, and C only with G. So each pair is one of two, and that pairs orientation is one of two. 4 values in total that a single pair can represent.
Re: A bit misleading (Score:2)
I might be wrong but 4^n / 2^n = 2^n which gets quite a bit bigger than 2 right?
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Still missing something important (Score:1)
They didn't include an Esperanto-to-Galactic Standard dictionary.
Maybe next time they will get it right.
Sigh.
Yeah, sure (Score:2)
Now I just need a usb3 to DNA cable.
Re:Yeah, sure (Score:4, Informative)
Good luck getting all the twists out of it.
All the data in the world (Score:5, Funny)
All the p0rn in the world contained in a few tablespoons of .....
Never mind.
DNA (Score:1)
pita byte hard drives (Score:1)
how many days to ship this to my home
Why Esperanto (Score:4, Funny)
Surely they should have used the original Klingon.
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More people know or will know Klingon.
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Isn't DNA biodegradable and even edible? (Score:2)
How is DNA a better long term storage than other media? How do you keep microbes from eating your data? Plastic, metal, etc.. are somewhat impervious to being eaten by living things. I don't see how a vat of DNA will not be contaminated and eaten by bacteria or something else. It's also heat sensitive and will break down quite rapidly in both heat and cold. DNA doesn't seem durable at all to me.
Re: Isn't DNA biodegradable and even edible? (Score:2)
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It has a half life of about 50,000 years.
According to Nature it's more like 521 years.
The sequenced paleo DNA is put together from many many broken bits, often from many different specimens.
can it to kill all the bacteria
I don't think you understand yet how cans work. You need to heat them to close to 100 deg. C to do the actual killing before you close it. And this will also denature the DNA. So no, you can't put DNA in a can just like that.
and it will self replicate in the can making billions of copies and preserve itself.
Not without exactly the right components, the right enzymes and a lot of ATP.
Re: Isn't DNA biodegradable and even edible? (Score:2)
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Also, please keep in mind that a human(oid) body contains trillions of copies of DNA. You can half lif
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I don't think DNA's better than a carefully crafted piece of nonreactive metal, but you can insert the DNA into living organisms, which will reproduce and maintain copies of it. We know that certain kinds of DNA, such as mitochondrial DNA, gets replicated with minimal modification.
I think a bigger problem is the ability to interpret the data. Normal DNA sequences are interpreted by converting them to protein, which is a mechanism that has survived for billions of years. But these guys are encoding it the sa
hmmm... (Score:2)
But like all data storage methods, DNA has a few shortcomings as well. The most significant upfront hurdle is cost. Hawkins says that current methods are similar to the cost for an Apple Hard Disk 20 back in 1980. Back then, about 20 megabytes of storage â" or the amount of data you'd need to use to download a 15-minute video â" went for about $1,500.
You call that cost? With the current state of that technology $1,500 is actually cheap.. So tell us, what are the other problems? how long will it last at room temperature? What's the speed of reading/writing?
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and in about 1982, I was selling a 5mb drive for $5,000. I think it was an 8" Corvus drive, but it's kind of been a while.
To an apple 2, which normally saw drives 0 and 1 for any controller slot (typically #6), it appeared as diskette drives 0 to 34 on the same controller . . .
New meaning to P2P and other possibilities (Score:2)
Could pave the way to Person to Person file sharing and networking, just by a mere handshake to transfer our data-laden DNA.
Historical records could be passed down for generations in our DNA without a central place to send takedown orders.
A "collective" of data, where we have the world's information built-in to our bodies. Just need a way for our brains to access it. Maybe personal computers will become obsolete at that point.
Cryptographicaly strong data injections by the State, giving or taking away priv
Who cares (Score:2)
This gets press and a publication, but is completely meaningless otherwise. DNA is inherently unstable and has to be fixed all the time to even remain moderately accurate. If you have a cell doing that (and conveniently doing suicide on worse errors), and you have a lot of cells all running on the same DNA, it is somewhat viable as a mechanism (but refer to cancer and diseases caused by mutation in general, and also to dying from old age for just some of the limitations), but as a data-storage mechanism in
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This is why they should have used the Hobbit, which Tolkien himself modified to get a new copyright . . .
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"Weeks even"? That is your idea of "stable" storage? Do you have any idea what you are talking about? As this is an "offline" type of storage, nothing at least having 10 years under normal conditions even begins to qualify.
Re: Apple Hard Disk (Score:2)
Uh, maybe if you bought it directly from Apple. I still recall paying ~$600 (outrageous, I though) for a 20MB SCSI drive purchased from a mail-order supplier in the '80s to use on a small SBC-based -- w/ built-in SCSI controller -- laboratory data collection system we
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Their timeline is off. The Apple Hard Disk 20 wasn't released until at least 1984, to work with the Macintosh. It wasn't a SCSI hard disk, it connected to the external floppy drive port of the original Macintosh or later machines that retained it. The Macintosh Plus was the first Mac with SCSI, allowing the use of third-party SCSI hard disks (although you couldn't use Apple's utilities to format them - there was a check for Apple firmware in Apple HD SC Setup). There were third-party hard disks that con
Unexpected (Score:2)
"Researchers Use DNA to Store 'The Wizard of Oz' - Translated Into Esperanto"
That's not a headline I ever expected to see, or one that I could have imagined. What a time to be alive, I guess.
Apple user (Score:2)
"Back then, about 20 megabytes of storage — or the amount of data you'd need to use to download a 15-minute video — went for about $1,500."
Yep, even back then Apple users were paying way too much.
I got 10 megabyte drive in 1981 for a PC-XT (or was it an AT?) for about $400 if I recall correctly. And the 20-meg drives were about $900 or so.
15 minutes of video in 20 mb? (Score:2)
How wonderful (Score:2)
One typo and you could create a virus that will destroy all life...
Computer mixed with DNA... (Score:2)
Antivirus will have to come from the CDC... WannaCry will only work with tear ducts installed... Screen masks required due to fear of COVID....
storage you can eat (Score:2)
I'd like to point out that DNA based organisms are subject to consumption by other DNA based organisms. There are a whole lot of creatures that would eat DNA storage if given the opportunity.
It might be possible for DNA to last many millennia, that is only if it doesn't get eaten.
The internet in a box? (Score:2)
The IT Crowd has already demonstrated why this would be a terrible idea [youtube.com].
At first, I was impressed (Score:2)
I was impressed, until I realized it was probably just the book, not the movie.
A movie in Esperanto? Ridiculous. (Insert Shatnerian pauses into the preceding sentences.)
people certainly find creative ways (Score:1)