Genetic Data Storage

The huge databases required large physical storage and traditionally platter-based hard drives and solid state flash drives dominate the industry to store data. Recently two scientists George Church and Sri Kosuri of Haevard Wyss have demonstrated how to store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA.

The binary data will be translated into the sequence of DNA base pairs and after this the data turned into the DNA itself. The standard laboratory techniques are taken several days for this and also trying to do virtually unlimited size of stashing information in DNA at room temperature. It might take several days to convert only 675 KB text, picture or any sort of data into 55,000 DNA strands through standard laboratory techniques.

Genetic data storage may easily become practical within a few decades as speed increases and costs decreases according to the Moore’s Law and things are already going like that. For example, in 2001 the cost $10,000 for a custom sequence of a million base pairs of DNA. Now, it costs about $0.10. However due to obvious size it might allow you to store virtually unlimited amount of data and it’s also stable in room temperature therefore the longevity of data will also improve.

Church told Harvard's R. Alan Leo that "You can drop it wherever you want, in the desert or your backyard, and it will be there 400,000 years later," that’s mean you can also collect your secret videos and these can be accessible after hundreds of thousands of years after you’re dead.  

While briefing Church says that reading and writing data in DNA is "slower than in other media, however, which makes it better suited for archival storage of massive amounts of data, rather than for quick retrieval or data processing."

This shows that scientists are now taking science world by storm. Hope so they will soon successful in storing a bulk of information into DNA by some faster techniques.

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