The Future Flash Drive

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is storage material of life data for every cell. However, in the future DNA not only stores genetic information, but also the song to the video. The scientists plan to use DNA as flash drive replacement for the future data storage media.

Researchers team from the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, based in the UK, demonstrating the ability of DNA as an information storage drawer. For them, the DNA is like a compact disc that can be saved with a variety of codes.

In their latest experiment, they moved some iconic world information. The digital files are selected for this study is a widely used format by computer users. Recordings of Martin Luther King's 1963 speech entitled "I Have A Dream" is stored in MP3 format, while scientific papers about the structure of DNA by Watson and Cricks stored in the form of pdf files. They also impart color photos of European Bioinformatics Institute and 154 William Shakespeare's sonnets.

"The success copying the data up to 100 percent," said the researcher team leader, Nick Goldman, on January 23, 2013 in the journal Nature, is extremely expensive right now, but eventually it could be used to store digital files without electricity for thousands of years. The researchers made use of the DNA structure, the technique uses the four bases of DNA — A, T, C and G — to achieve the high information density. If the base strands are arranged with care, researchers could get a sequence of sentences on paper similar information. Writing like this is similar storage of information in a combination of zero-one (binary code) in computer programming.

Researcher Nick Goldman holds the 
DNA that encodes all of Shakespeare's 
sonnets, a photograph, and an mp3 clip  
of the famous "I have a dream" speech. 
(Picture from: http://www.livescience.com/)

The size of data transferred to the new DNA of 739 kilobytes. But researchers believe the amount of data that can be entered more. In their estimation, this DNA data storage techniques could store variety of digital information in the world. At this time, the world has a thousand trillion megabytes of digital data.

The DNA as data storage has several advantages. The information stored in DNA can remain a long time with minimal maintenance. See, the oldest DNA ever found by scientist is tens of thousands of years old. The details stored in the old DNA is as good as new one that obtained from living cells.

It is, understandably, still incredibly expensive: creating synthetic DNA and then sequencing it to read off the data is getting far easier, but it’s still a time- and cash-consuming business. Keep hold of your hard drives for now, but DNA could represent a viable storage solution in the future. *** [EKA | FROM VAROUS SOURCES | LIVESCIENCE | ANTON WILLIAM | KORAN TEMPO 4128]

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