Recently I purchased a 2 TB Seagate hard disk. But within a month or so, I ended up filling more than half of it already. Yes, i get to listen this a lot, “what in the world did you fill it up with?”. My answer is always simple and consistent, “that’s how your gadget is repaired when you get it to me.” I am a collector. I collect any digital information that interests me.
Be it songs from late 80’s, or all the American sit-coms I laughed like crazy, or could be all the Windows, or Linux or Mac OS setups. I just love to collect. Thus, the huge storage. However, at times I feel really lazy to pull out that bulky hard disk, install its power cable first, then attach its USB, wait for the next 30 seconds to let my OS recognize the device and then the next 20 minutes filtering out my needs.
But to our savior comes another progress in Science and Technology. Here is something that’s finger tip sized and can store tons of data of these CD’s and hard disks. Something that can store over hours of HD movies. Yet another nano-sized storage device?
Nope. It is not any electronic gadget. It is our DNA.
Led by Nick Goldman, researchers from the European Bio informatics Institute in England began by converting the five files into bits (technically, “trits” — they used a triplet code comprising zero, one and two). Then they translated that code into one made of As, Cs, Gs and Ts, the “letters” of DNA. So TAGAT replaces the “T” that begins line two of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18: “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” The team also incorporated a way to index the data — sort of a DNA version of the Dewey Decimal System — and an error correction code to keep the data clean.
Then the researchers sent their code to the instrumentation company Agilent Technologies in Santa Clara, Calif. There scientists read the code and used it to build millions upon millions of DNA molecules, which they sent back to the researchers via FedEx in a test tube inside a cardboard box.
When the test tube, about the size of a pinkie finger, arrived, Goldman and his colleagues sequenced the DNA, the same way researchers read the DNA of organisms, reconstructing the original files. The translation from data to DNA and back was free of errors, says Goldman.
Similarly a 26-second sound clip from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was also encoded and then decoded from the DNA.
However, due to technical complexes, the DNA can not be used as the thumb sized hard disks, but it can be expected to revolutionise our storage devices in the next 10-15 years. it could store information that needs to last for at least 50 years, such as government records or library texts. And who knows where it will go, wonders Goldman.
Sources : National Post and The Times Of India National Daily.