Scientists have discovered a way to use DNA’s double helix structure as a filing system to store reams of data for up to 2,00o years. According to the groundbreaking discovery, the structure of the data’s storage in relation to DNA’s framework would allow easier data acquisition.

Researcher, Robert Grass, said,”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,” and adds, “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.” The binary language he’s referring to in terms of DNA is the four nucleotides A, C, T and G.

DNA was considered as a storage model because of its inherent durability and capacity to cache such large amounts of data. In comparison, a current external hard drive the size of a book can accumulate about five terabytes of information with a lifespan of around 50 years. But a DNA-framework hard drive could store more than 300,000 terabytes and last for generations.

In a recent test, scientists encoded DNA with 83 kilobytes of text from the Swiss Federal Charter from the year 1291 and the Method of Archimedes from the 10th century. Since the DNA hard drive is an organic compound, they warmed it to about 160 degrees Fahrenheit for one week, which equates to stockpiling it 50 degrees for around 2000 years and found that the information wasn’t corrupted.

As advanced as the discovery is, the technology won’t be available as a mass market product for some time, but its present intended purpose is to store data portals such as Wikipedia.

Grass concludes, “This interest in preserving information is something we have lost, especially in a digital world, and adds, “And that’s what I’d like to help address and encourage people to do: Save information we have today for future times.”

Source: HNGN