We normally use hard-drive, memory card or flash drive to store data. If they crash anyhow, then all information will be lost. So which is the safest way to store data for long time? Researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in UK say, the best way to store large amounts of data is in the form of De-oxyribo Nucleic Acid (DNA) inside our body.
Two researchers at the EBI – Nick Goldman and his colleague Ewan Birney – have successfully encoded 739 kilobytes of hard drive data inside human DNA and later retrieved those content with 100 percent accuracy. In order to test their DNA storage theory, they sent encoded versions of an .mp3 of Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream,” a .pdf of James Watson and Francis Crick’s seminal paper, “Molecular structure of nucleic acids,” and a .txt file of 154 sonnets of Shakespeare inside a human DNA. Later when they retrieved the data, all contents were undistorted.
Goldman said, “We’ve created a code that’s error tolerant using a molecular form we know will last in the right conditions for 10,000 years, or possibly longer. As long as someone knows what the code is, you will be able to read it back if you have a machine that can read DNA.”
According to researcher Goldman and Birney, as DNA lasts for tens of thousands of years, so it is incredibly secure to store huge amounts of data and hence the data will remain safe and intact. Researchers believe through this new method, at least 100 million hours of HD video can be put in about a cup of DNA.
You will find the detailed description of this research in the journal Nature.
