A new breakthrough in data storage was introduced by lead researcher Robert Grass and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. The group found a way to store data and to retrieve it in a DNA strand, even after thousands of years.
"A little after the discovery of the double helix architecture of DNA, people figured out that the coding language of nature is very similar to the binary language we use in computers," Dr. Robert Grass said. "On a hard drive, we use zeros and ones to represent data, and in DNA we have four nucleotides, A, C, T and G," Grass added.
The team capsulized an encoded DNA with 83 kilobytes (approximately one terabyte = 1.07 billion kilobytes or KB) of text from the Swiss Federal Charter, 1291, and the Method of Archimedes from the 10th century, then warmed it to nearly 160 degrees Fahrenheit (71°C) for one week, which is the equivalent of keeping it for 2,000 years at about 50 degrees.
When they decoded the stored file, it was error-free.
Theoretically, an ounce of DNA has the ability to store 300,000 terabytes (TB) of data, and can store it for up to 2,000 years. Presently, an External Hard Drive with data storage capability of a few terabytes can only last up to 50 years.
"If you go back to medieval times in Europe, we had monks writing in books to transmit information for the future, and some of those books still exist. Now, we save information on hard drives, which we wear out in a few decades," Grass commented.
The researchers, however, are now in peril to find a solution to a problem they encountered during their study. Though they can decode the whole data that has been encoded in the DNA strand, they can't exactly pinpoint data that they want to open.
"Right now, we can only read everything that's in the drop. But I can't point to a specific place within the drop and read only one file," Grass said.
