Can DNA Help Us Store Data for 1,000 Years? (bbc.com) 50
"You know you're a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge," says Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research tells the BBC — holding up a tiny vial with a light film at the bottom:
But this DNA is special. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. "That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds," says Zielinski.
Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies. Scientists have already encoded films, books and computer operating systems into DNA. Netflix has even used it to store an episode of its 2020 thriller series Biohackers.
The information stored in DNA defines what it is to be human (or any other species for that matter). But many experts argue it offers an incredibly compact, durable and long-lasting form of storage that could replace the many forms of unreliable digital media available, which regularly become defunct and require huge amounts of energy to store. Meanwhile, some researchers are exploring other ways we could store data effectively forever, such as etching information onto incredibly durable glass beads, a modern take on cave drawings.
Even before the issue of the energy required to power (and cool) data centers, Zielinski points out that data stored on hard drives "lasts on average maybe 10 to 20 years, maybe 50 if you're lucky and the conditions are perfect." And yet we've already been able to recover DNA from million-year-old wooly mammoths...
Olgica Milenkovic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, acknowledges that DNA can be damaged by things like humidity, acids, and radiation — "But if it's kept cold and dry, it's good for hundreds of years." And if it's stored in an ice vault, "it can last forever, pretty much." (And unlike floppy disks — DNA-formatted data will never become obsolete.)
It's not the only option. Peter Kazansky, a professor in optoelectronics at the University of Southampton, has created an optical storage technology that etches nano-structures onto glass disks. But Latchesar Ionkov, a computer scientist working on DNA storage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, believes we're just decades away from being able to store the estimated 33 zettabytes of data that humans will have produced by 2025 in a space the size of a ping-pong ball.
Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies. Scientists have already encoded films, books and computer operating systems into DNA. Netflix has even used it to store an episode of its 2020 thriller series Biohackers.
The information stored in DNA defines what it is to be human (or any other species for that matter). But many experts argue it offers an incredibly compact, durable and long-lasting form of storage that could replace the many forms of unreliable digital media available, which regularly become defunct and require huge amounts of energy to store. Meanwhile, some researchers are exploring other ways we could store data effectively forever, such as etching information onto incredibly durable glass beads, a modern take on cave drawings.
Even before the issue of the energy required to power (and cool) data centers, Zielinski points out that data stored on hard drives "lasts on average maybe 10 to 20 years, maybe 50 if you're lucky and the conditions are perfect." And yet we've already been able to recover DNA from million-year-old wooly mammoths...
Olgica Milenkovic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, acknowledges that DNA can be damaged by things like humidity, acids, and radiation — "But if it's kept cold and dry, it's good for hundreds of years." And if it's stored in an ice vault, "it can last forever, pretty much." (And unlike floppy disks — DNA-formatted data will never become obsolete.)
It's not the only option. Peter Kazansky, a professor in optoelectronics at the University of Southampton, has created an optical storage technology that etches nano-structures onto glass disks. But Latchesar Ionkov, a computer scientist working on DNA storage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, believes we're just decades away from being able to store the estimated 33 zettabytes of data that humans will have produced by 2025 in a space the size of a ping-pong ball.
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole idea is stupid, yet crops up time and again. Use laser-etching on metal that keeps (gold foil for example) and be done with it. Far simpler, far cheaper and it is obvious that data is stored there. With DNA, you always need some additional instructions anyways on a different medium or nobody would even notice it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If those CDs had been made with gold foil, they'd still play correctly, unless of course it got scratched off the top. If you stamped a DVD with gold foil it would last thousands of years, since the metal layer is between two plastic layers.
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Indeed. The coating on the aluminum degrades and then the Aluminum does too. As Aluminum does in free air. On a thicker layer, it just forms Aluminum Oxyde and that prevents further corrosion, but on a really thin layer with tiny lands and groves, that doe snot work.
The AC is not very smart, but has a big ego. You would expect that people know at least the general properties of Gold and Aluminum...
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The AC is not very smart, but has a big ego. You would expect that people know at least the general properties of Gold and Aluminum...
Maybe on the slashdot of yesteryear, but check out my moderation. Apparently, understanding that gold is less reactive than aluminum is overrated here now. This is post-nerd slashdot.
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Ah. Those no-honor assholes that abuse the moderation points they obviously got by mistake...
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Well, probably. Basic scientific knowledge seems to be overrated with a lot of people these days. Seems we are approaching a post-reality era, where every snowflake is allowed to deeply believe their fluffy fantasies about reality are true and nobody qualifies as adult anymore.
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Now if only I could get a working CD player that would read that gold material CD 1000 years from now...
It's not that complicated conceptually, though obviously a CD player is a fairly complicated thing. If society hasn't collapsed, then whoever is around then should be able to figure it out. I mean, if they're not too busy farming mushrooms and mealworms.
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That is much harder to do, takes up more physical space, and is impractical to layer in 3D. DNA is a molecule that can be wrapped into balls around histones and then specifically unraveled and read at will. Ten gigabytes of data can be stored, in 3D, in the volume of 10 cubic microns. You can store ten terabytes in a volume that you need a microscope to see.
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> That is much harder to do, takes up more physical space, and is impractical to layer in 3D
What about speed issues and errors during the reading and writing of DNA, and the damage that can occur during those processes, including the repeated folding and unfolding of the DNA.
in a biological context DNA is really amazing, but its portrayal as a data storage medium might in large part rest on a simplistic parallel drawn between machines and biology.
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> In theory, the speed of data extraction would be the speed of DNA chemical reactions, and (in bulk)
What do you mean in bulk ?
> that is significantly faster than current mechanical readers
Why compare to mechanical ones ?
> As for corrupted DNA, in bulk, it can still preserve more information that alternate electromechanical physical media, 1000 years from now
Same questions ?
> but its real advantages kick in 100K years from now
I'm no expert but isn't that kind of on a fantasy level ? Who knows wh
Re: Nope (Score:2)
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This has already been done. The inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey encoded the accumulated knowledge of their entire culture into DNA strands they stored in clay jars 11,000 years ago. Unfortunately, they didn't leave any instructions on how it was encoded, how to read it, what the out-of-sequence chromosomes stood for, and the fact they used a base-12 numbering system. /s
Can you imagine the user's manual that would need to accompany any attempt to encode retrievable data in DNA that would be usab
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Or even better carve writings into stone. Large, unfathomably heavy and unmovable stone monoliths. Thats how you ensure your manifesto survives the eons.
Writing to DNA is only good if someone is around to remember something is written there.
high-capacity storage (Score:5, Funny)
Real nerds store DNA in their tube socks.
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I store it in your mom's mouth.
Bad Idea (Score:2)
I don't think DNA has adequate error correction features.
It would be like storing important documents etched by sticks in tables filled with loose sand.
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What are you talking about? Do you mean error correction when written, or with time/degradation? If you mean error correction when written, maybe so with the current technology of artificial DNA synthesis, but that can be accounted for and corrected with any error correction coding scheme like Reed-Solomon. Also, btw DNA polymerase enzymes actually have good error correction. The error rate when a mammal's cell makes a copy of its DNA bases is between 1 base error in 100 million bases to 1 in 10 billion. Re
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I should also point out that the polymerase can be engineered to boost its accuracy. For example, a polymerase I use often is Q5. Q5 is an engineered version of the wild Taq polymerase. Natural taq, un-engineered and when operating at 70 degrees (Celsius,) has an error rate of around 1 in 4000. Q5 though has an error rate close to 1 in 1 million even though it operates pretty fast.
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...Natural taq, un-engineered and when operating at 70 degrees (Celsius,) has an error rate of around 1 in 4000....
If you have to hold it at 70 degrees C to avoid error, I'd barely call that a reliable storage medium.
Also, you seem to be talking about error in copying. For storage, the question is error with time. DNA has a half life of 520 years (and this gets worse if it gets warm.)
...but the real problem is that we will lose the knowledge of how it was encoded long before then. It will need a set of instructions "how to decode early 21st century computer encoding" as well as "how the 21st century computer encoding
Re: Bad Idea (Score:2)
Well the 70 degrees thing was for the Taq enzyme specifically, and btw it actually has a broad operating range up to boiling point. I am not sure how the accuracy varies with temperature though, itâ(TM)s possible it maintains it. As for the stability of DNA due to repeated transcription, I know from studies of cancer cells that the more often the DNA is transcribed the more stable it is. But leave that aside, even with higher error rates there are data encoding schemes (the famous one being Reed-Solom
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you're a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge (Score:3)
EVERYTHING in my fridge has some DNA.
Storage length isn't the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is the tech to read it will be long gone in 1000 years.
Re:Storage length isn't the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet, the summary asserts that "unlike floppy disks — DNA-formatted data will never become obsolete." ... because ... "With every man-made technology, you need a new device to read it." Apparently, read-write DNA drives are just growing in an orchard somewhere. All we have to do is pick them off the tree, and plug them into our computers.
What I can't understand is why someone (especially a "senior scientist") would let this stuff fly out of their mouth and into the BBC without giving a cursory examination of where this tech would even be useful. This is Metaverse-level stupid, if not in dollar amounts, then at least intellectually.
In fact, the only scenario where this might be useful is in spycraft. Imagine hiding secret information within the DNA of an apple, or in the bacteria on your shoe, etc. So the use case is basically the opposite of what they're saying: When you want to make data obscure and hard to retrieve.
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Re: Storage length isn't the problem. (Score:2)
As a molecular biologist (Score:5, Interesting)
Look it all seems fancy, but reading large stretches of dna is actually not easy. Also DNA mutates. At the same time we have ancient paper records, that need no machine of any kind to decypher.
Sure libraries burn down, but your precious dna data wont survive a week outside the lab. Also copying dna is very complex, in case you actually want to be sure you have the entire dataset..,
This is a solution without a problem
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If so, records that are carved into walls, or inscribed on clay tablets should be trivial to read. And yet, we still have no idea what language Linear A [wikipedia.org] is in, let alone how to translate it.
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You made his point, or maybe a corollary point; the length of time the data storage medium lasts is not really the problem, reading and translating the data storage is the problem.
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For all methods, DNA or carved walls, you need to understand the language. For DNA however you also need a million-dollar machine and lab environment to process the data.
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PCR generally stops after 4KB of data, and much less if you have a proofreader enzyme. Try copying a whole TB of data with PCR. Thats millions of reactions, and the primers all need to be unique and multiplexed so that you do not get dimer formation. Ah yes and you also want to ensure *all* of your millions of regions are transcribed. So you need an entire HiSeq just to verify....
Related (Score:2)
I found this article that discusses the addition of other neucleotides very interesting for people wondering what the future of DNA storage may entail: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Certainly better than just binary representation! Its like a full 56k analog modem for storage! :)
funding grab with nonsense (Score:1)
DNA is a very very fragile molecule without special storage. This is nonsense.
Etch writing into metamorphic rock, that works well.
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-20C is good for some months, -80C in ethanol good for some years, but for decades -200 C is the norm.
A century? Centuries? Pffffttttt, yeah lotsa luck, you know those "corpsicle" businesses scamming people with fatal diseases making promise of future rejuvenation with sci-fi magical nanotech or whatever mostly have gone out of business and the corpses turned into rotten meat. Anything needing plugging into mains power and in a cryo Dewar is going to get fucked in the near future, on average much less th
I also store DNA in my fridge (Score:2)
A million years? (Score:2)
Even before the issue of the energy required to power (and cool) data centers, Zielinski points out that data stored on hard drives "lasts on average maybe 10 to 20 years, maybe 50 if you're lucky and the conditions are perfect." And yet we've already been able to recover DNA from million-year-old wooly mammoths.
Until you've tried to recover data from a million-year-old hard drive, how will you know for sure whether it's truly unrecoverable?