In the current times, we are generating a brutal amount of data day by day. That forced us to find more and more methods to store all this information. That is to find data storage methods that must also be efficient and durable. We have already seen bits like quartz disks, but the one that is ringing more and more within the technological community is DNA.
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Today Seth Shipman, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, is publishing a new milestone in this field. They announce that for the first time they have managed to store a file in the DNA of a living organism. That is something which has only success with the synthetic DNA.
Gif Image stored and retrieved from living DNA
The first time DNA from a living organism gets on to store data. Also, several companies are now investing in it as a storage medium. Microsoft is one of them, and today, for the first time confirmed that they have succeeded in data storage in the genomes of living bacterium Escherichia coli. That has been possible thanks to the use of the CRISPR gene editing system, with which they have managed to insert an animated image of 36 x 26 pixels, yes, a GIF.
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The researchers converted each of the animation pixels into nucleotides, thus constructing the DNA blocks. The image chosen was by the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. He was the first person to create moving photographs in the 1870s. Project managers retrieved the data by sequencing bacterial DNA, thus obtaining 90% accuracy by reading The pixel nucleotide code. So, that is a real achievement.
Yaniv Erlich, a Columbia University biologist who did not participate in this project, mentions that we are facing a significant advance in testing the limits of DNA storage. That is an advancement that will allow us to experiment in human cells. And that opens the door to the unlimited storage for up to 10,000 years.
Age of bacterial hard disks
This small image does not compare with what they have managed to store in synthetic DNA. But it is quite an achievement because in living DNA cells that continuously move, change, divide and die. That is undoubtedly one of the most important steps in DNA storage. A technique that assures us that in the future we will be able to store a large number of big files in a small molecule invisible to the naked eye. Or we can store our data in a molecule that we can even carry in Our body and see the birth of so-called ‘bacterial hard disks.’