How DNA is being converted into our next form of digital data storage
DNA, on earth, serves as the lifeblood for any living organisms, preserving and allowing life to thrive, stemming from its ability to keep cells alive and functional, sending out specific instructions to create proteins, instruct organelles and produce the needs for our bodies. In other words, since it has been discovered it has been trademarked for being the densest and most reliable form of data storage, storing about 215 million gigabytes of data. Where just in comparison a simple hard-drive that is bigger in size can store on average 2 megabytes.
Dna, brings promise to the world, to have something so minuscule yet universal, storing about 215 million gigabytes of data a storage in modern terms that would equate to a 300 million dollar investment without the cost of maintenance. Eventhough DNA serves as a promising technique to further our data storage, what makes such a craving necessary? Most importantly what does it hope to improve?
Data, in the most extreme case is digital or internet currency, preached as god-like and essential to running the perfect website and gauge public attention to direct traffic and consumers. But yet it is also one of the most expensive things to store, with the rapid showing of a globally digitalized world, it begs to how to hold onto such data and keep our world from a state of dysphoria, as the current production of hard drives threatens the climates, which begs for more innovative and sustainable alternatives. As our current use of both data storages are unsustainable, inconsistent and ultimately very primitive to what our modern technology can develop. But there are 3 factors that contribute most to this problem…
- robustness
- Information density
- Reading the information stored
ROBUSTNESS
Robustness in the context of technology is referred as ones ability to sustain and function over time. To sustain and function overtime, allows the longevity of data, without the constant repetition of manufacturing new drives as a substitute. The life time or robustness of simple stroage devices we utilise today, have a consumption span of 3–5 years and data drives for 30 years if placed in a controlled environment, but again only able to hold a small limited amount of data.
The span of 3–5 years may be reasonable but according to our consumption of the internet, we generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, begs the question to how sustainable is such drives?As the failures of hard drives within their first year of action ranges between 1–3%, that can estinguish 83 million hard-drives only calling for more unsustainable productions of data capacity and plateau in our environment for simply years on end.
The current solution to avoid the copy and paste technique of revving data is bound to cause problems but now imagine attempting to copy this much or even more amounts of data as our reliance and exposure to technology grows. But DNA allows us to solve this very imminent problem, as the consistency and longevity of DNA, preserved years after its host's death, which allows us to draw onto the characteristics of certain primitive animals, from that of a multitude of different characteristics such as how they move, what they eat, how they live, their ancestors and ultimately what they are as a species. Being able to survive decades after the animal has died, is ideal for robustness, to sustain and function over a long time.
Information density
Informationation density is simply the amount of information or data you can store in a drive or a form of storage, hence the more dense something is the more data it can store within a smaller area. At the opening of this very article, we have already drawn your attention to the poor capacity of data in that of modern storage systems.
So how does DNA promise to fix this within the digital world as we already know it is capable of doing this within abiotic creatures. To suitably answer this question we must understand the basic anatomy of DNA and how it operates within the human body and copy and paste these procedures digitally. Firstly in order to utilise DNA as a form of storage, we must convert the 4 bases adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine into language that is comprehensible and paramount to that of the functioning of technology, as adenine is renamed as 00, thymine is known as 01, guanine is known as 10 and finally, cytosine is converted to 11 and sequenced to a unique number similar to that of how such bases are organized to give off unique characteristics from person to person. Which allows us to make sense of the data and messages when decrypted, but how shall it be decrypted?How do we translate and actually read this data, as currently to my knowledge it is purely a bunch of matrices encoded in zeros and one.
Information reader.
Synthesizing information and reading data, is what allows the interaction of humans and laptops to occur, that manages to translate large sums of matrices into the languages that we speak and understand. It is often a common fallacy to believe data is just what we see on Facebook, normally pleasing to the eye and easy to understand.
Moreover, such data or code, is only achieved when synthesised and understood, pure writings of such code include that of HTML which just look like rows off code, but in google chrome, it looks more like a website a link or an image.
Even though synthesing data is cheap and gets the job done, each time we develop a new form of data storage, the technique needed to synethise new and improved data storage alters. Simply put a DVD player may not understand that of the data encoded in sim cards. Such unique ways to comprehend our data only leads to our inability to properly access any materials stuck on an old storage disk as it requires a form of decyphering and synthesis technology that is ancient. Making much relevant information perished due to their inaccessibility, with each new innovation or step into the future.
But DNA here serves as a hopeful solution to this very issue. Since DNA’s characteristics are distinguished to be long lasting, durable and informationally dense, the need for constantly developing synthesis technology will slow down.
The recent development in biotechnology allows us to deconstruct DNA and to analyse the information stored, forming a picture or a website.Whilst in a case of loss quality, scientist have implemented like a system to help or recover the damaged or mutated DNA, by error-correcting codes, working simply as a simple algebraic equation. So let's say that theoretically, our DNA is only 3 bases along and when unravelled has the numbers 7,4 and x (x=damaged base), in this case, it is almost impossible to guess what the number x is, but with the error-correcting code we also include the sum of these numbers, amounting to 16 meaning that x through simple algebra must be 5. The error-correcting code in DNA is groundbreaking as it ensures the quality and reduces the effect of noise generated when DNA is copied.
DNA is great, it provides improvement and ultimately a surface to change, but it still sounds very theoretical, expensive and out of human hands for a long time, or is it? It turns out that how crazy this may seem, there are already significant breakthroughs into making this visualisation feasible and possible. The likes of Microsoft has already produced and researched a system to read DNA and that of the soon to be digitized DNA. While companies such as kiloblaster, Helixworks, economics and Catalog are all racing to produce their own unique way of synthesizing DNA and putting this very theoretical plan into motion. But just like anything, it only takes time before it becomes so well understood and mass-produced it becomes universal.
Additional takeaway
The introduction of DNA as a form of storage is not only groundbreaking and in many aspects a saving piece of instruments against our unsustainable use of drives, however, it also brings up a bigger picture that we need to resonate with. Introducing DNA as a form of storage and contribution to human society inspired directly from nature, shall not be the last of its kind but instead the first, in binding both human societies to the world around us from that of our eco-systems and climates. This piece of technology itself symbolises the fact that we need to start to open up our eyes to the world around us, we often secluded and stereotype nature as being primitive and irrational. But the ability for nature to survive for so long, keep the world running through even the toughest of periods, means something, everything that nature produces and creates should always be an inspiration to how we should build our world, around that of what matters and the forest that we are born in. So destroying nature periodically believing that it is of no value, is only equivalent to destroying our computers and institutions, an example I like to give is that there is no better carbon capture technology than that of trees, yet we try to create better ones rather than working with the technology (tree) that is already existent. Sometimes we must take a step back and really understand the role of every atom and every biotic or abiotic factor before we can truly improve this world for both humans and anything that occupies it.
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About the author:
Eldon Tse — Hong Kong 🇭🇰 | Instagram
Always open to listening to new opinion and groundbreaking ideas, to reach me please feel free to contact me through Instagram.