The future of technology lies not only in the constant growth of processing power of processors or the transition to quantum computers, but also in the evolution of storage devices. Humanity generates a huge amount of information that has to be stored in traditional ways - on HDD and SSD drives. Periodically, scientists propose alternative ways of storing information, some of which are quite unusual. For example, using DNA as a data store. Recently, researchers at the Waterford Institute of Technology have proposed another way to bring this technology to life.
Experts suggest that by 2025, humanity will generate an average of 160 zettabytes of data annually. Today this amount of data is 16 zettabytes. One zettabyte is 1021 bytes of data, so now you can roughly imagine the scale of the situation. The existing data storage methods are not only ineffective, but also require significant energy costs, as well as large spaces to accommodate the necessary hardware.
Irish researchers have proposed another way to store data inside DNA. Today, several groups of scientists are trying to develop such technologies with their own methods, but experts from the Waterford Institute of Technology approached the problem from an unusual perspective. They use bacteria to archive and record data. This method allows you to store 1 zettabyte of data in just 1 gram of DNA.
“We see in DNA a kind of cell software that contains a code that fully describes its functionality. That is why we can safely assume that DNA can be used to store our own data. We take information in digital form, transform it into nucleotides and store the data with their help,”reflects the project manager, Dr. Sasitharan Balasubramaniam.
At the moment this method is very expensive, but over time, its cost will decrease to a reasonable level. As it once happened with the hard drives or solid-state data drives we are used to today. The technology, created by Irish scientists, uses plasmids (small DNA molecules that are physically separate from genomic chromosomes and can replicate autonomously) to encode and store data within the Novablue strain of E. coli bacteria.
The choice in favor of this strain was made largely due to the fact that it has a fixed position, which ensures reliable data safety. The data can be extracted using the conjugation process and transferred from place to place using the mobile bacterial strain HB101 of the same E. coli. Scientists control this process with the antibiotics tetracycline and streptomycin. This method is not only expensive, as we noted above, but also rather slow. At the moment, it takes up to three days in real time to find the necessary data. But scientists are sure: the process can be significantly accelerated, because today there are methods for writing data into DNA in a matter of seconds.
Sergey Gray