The amount of data in the world is doubling every two years, according to a 2014 estimate by EMC, but data storage technologies are having a hard time keeping up. That’s led some researchers to look for a solution in biology rather than computers.
DNA, the molecule that uses biological codes to store genetic information, has been studied for a while as a possible solution for storing human-generated data. And this week, researchers in New York unveiled a new technique that allows DNA to store more data than ever before.
With the help of a California startup that makes synthetic DNA, researchers Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski of Columbia University and the New York Genome Center, were able to transfer a complete computer operating system, a very old movie, a $50 Amazon gift card and more into a tiny speck of DNA. That achieves a data storage density of 215 petabytes per gram. In theory, that means it would be possible to store all the information humans have ever generated into the space of a single room.
A Million Times More Data-Dense
“DNA has several advantages to store information,” Erlich said in a video provided by Columbia University. “The first thing is that it’s very compact. In effect, it’s about one million times more compact than what you can get when you use a regular digital media.”
The technique developed by Erlich and Zielinski uses a “DNA fountain” algorithm that randomly packs binary code into data droplets that can be mapped onto the building blocks of DNA: the nucleotides C, G, A and T. Each data droplet was also marked with a barcode to help with decoding the DNA back into the original digital information.
Erlich and Zielinski used this technique to pack a large amount of digital data into a…