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DNA is a much denser data storage medium than anything humans can design, but the problem is that it’s fragile. So now scientists have taken another page out of nature’s book and created artificial amber to protect data stored in DNA longer term.
As with so many things, our data storage methods pale in comparison to the one nature concocted. A single gram of DNA can hold up to 215 petabytes (215 million GB) of data, which means you could essentially store the entire internet in a shoebox. It’s no surprise then that scientists have been experimenting with how to write data to DNA, read it back, and importantly, keep it safe while it’s on there.
Now, scientists at MIT have created a kind of artificial amber that can protect DNA for long periods of time, and easily gives up its data when needed. The material is called a thermoset, which means it’s made up of polymers that become a glassy solid when heated, but can also be degraded on demand when exposed to certain chemicals.
The specific mix of monomers used is designed to pull DNA into spherical complexes in the center, with a water-repelling layer on the outside. That’s important, because moisture can damage DNA. Then the mixture is heated to set it into a glass-like block, with the data-laden DNA preserved inside.
When it’s time to read that data back, the material is exposed to a molecule called cysteamine, which breaks down the bonds holding the thermoset together. Once it’s in small pieces, a detergent called SDS is added to separate the DNA without damaging it. In a classically clumsy reverse-engineered acronym, they call their technique Thermoset-REinforced Xeropreservation (T-REX).
In tests, the MIT team successfully used T-REX to store DNA sequences of varying lengths, at temperatures of up to 75 °C (167 °F). The first test sequences encoded for the Emancipation Proclamation, the MIT logo, an entire human genome – and fittingly, the theme music from Jurassic Park. When the DNA was removed and sequenced, the researchers found that no errors had been introduced.
“Freezing DNA is the number one way to preserve it, but it’s very expensive, and it’s not scalable,” said James Banal, co-senior author of the study. “I think our new preservation method is going to be a technology that may drive the future of storing digital information on DNA.”
Currently, T-REX takes a few hours to write data to the DNA and set it in the thermoset material, but the team says this could be sped up with some optimization. Even so, it’s not likely that this will lead to us using DNA-based hard drives in consumer computers – rather, artificial amber might be a good option for longer-term, archival data storage.
The research was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Source: MIT