Digital storage: Shakespeare’s sonnets encoded in DNA
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Scientists were able to decode the information and reproduce the words of the Bard with complete accuracy.
The new method by researchers at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI ), published in the journal Nature, makes it possible to store at least 100 million hours of high-definition video in about a cup of DNA.
The technique made it possible to store a 26 second excerpt from Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech and a photo of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory where the work took place.
Researchers were also able to turn a copy of Watson and Crick's paper describing the nature ofDNA into genetic code.
There is a lot of digital information in the world — about three zettabytes' worth (3000 billion billion bytes) — and the constant influx of new digital content poses a real challenge for archivists. Hard disks are expensive and require a constant supply of electricity, while even the best "no-power" archiving materials such as magnetic tape degrade within a decade.
This is a growing problem in the life sciences, where massive volumes of data — including DNA sequences — make up the fabric of the scientific record.
"We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths , which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it," said Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI . "It's also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy," Goldman said in a statement.
Reading DNA is fairly straightforward, but writing it has until now been a major hurdle to making DNA storage a reality . The new method required synthesising DNA from the encoded information which was done by a California-based company.
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