{"id":35106,"date":"2017-03-06T12:03:08","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T20:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/hard-drives-of-the-future-could-be-made-of-dna"},"modified":"2017-06-04T07:10:08","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T14:10:08","slug":"hard-drives-of-the-future-could-be-made-of-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/hard-drives-of-the-future-could-be-made-of-dna","title":{"rendered":"Hard drives of the future could be made of DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/hard-drives-of-the-future-could-be-made-of-dna.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Our data-driven society is churning out more information than traditional storage technology can handle, so scientists are looking for a solution in Nature\u2019s hard drive: DNA. A pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center recently wrote a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, an Amazon gift card and other files into DNA strands and retrieved them without errors, according to a study published in the latest edition of <a href=\"http:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/355\/6328\/950\"><em>Science<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There are several advantages to using DNA. It\u2019s a lot smaller than traditional media; a single gram can fit 215,000 times more data than a one terabyte hard drive, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/science\/archive\/2017\/03\/this-speck-of-dna-contains-a-movie-a-computer-virus-and-an-amazon-gift-card\/518373\/\"><em>The Atlantic<\/em><\/a> notes. It\u2019s also incredibly durable. Scientists are using DNA thousands of years old to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2017\/02\/17\/humanity-is-on-the-cusp-of-de-extincting-the-wooly-mammoth\/\">de-extinct<\/a> wooly mammoths, for example. But, until now, they\u2019ve only unlocked a fraction of its storage capacity. Study coauthors Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski were able to fit the theoretical maximum amount of information per nucleotide using a new method inspired by how movies stream across the internet.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe mapped the bits of the files to DNA nucleotides. Then, we synthesized these nucleotides and stored the molecules in a test-tube,\u201d Erlich explained in an interview with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/blog\/post\/dna-could-be-the-future-of-data-storage\"><em>ResearchGate<\/em><\/a>. \u201cTo retrieve the information, we sequenced the molecules. This is the basic process. To pack the information, we devised a strategy\u2014called DNA Fountain\u2014that uses mathematical concepts from coding theory. It was this strategy that allowed us to achieve optimal packing, which was the most challenging aspect of the study.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2017\/03\/03\/DNA-hard-drive-storage\/?sr_source=Facebook\">https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2017\/03\/03\/DNA-hard-drive-storage\/?sr_source=Facebook<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our data-driven society is churning out more information than traditional storage technology can handle, so scientists are looking for a solution in Nature\u2019s hard drive: DNA. A pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center recently wrote a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, an Amazon gift card and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,418,2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-internet","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58487,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35106\/revisions\/58487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}