AMAZING!! SCIENTIST HAVE DISCOVERED A WAY OF STORING DATA IN DNA

Did you know that Researchers have decoded the genomes of mammoths and not just that, but also a 700,000-year-old horse using DNA fragments which were extracted from fossils in the past few years. DNA clearly persists far longer than the bodies for which it carries the genetic codes. This is because even after the body is dead and decayed, the DNA of the body can still be extracted.
Computer scientists and engineers have long had the intention of harnessing DNA’s tininess and resilience for the purpose of digital data storage. The idea is to encode all those 0s and 1s into the molecules A, C, G, and T which together forms the twisted,
ladder-shaped DNA polymer and due to the advances in DNA synthesis and sequencing in this era, technology has been brought forward by leaps and bounds.

Recent experiments indicate that we might very soon be able to encode all the digital information of this world into a few liters of DNA and then, read it back thousands of years later.
Recent interest from Microsoft and other tech companies is energizing this field. An announcement was made by Microsoft Research last month that it would pay synthetic biology start-up Twist Bioscience an undisclosed amount of money to make 10 million DNA strands designed by Microsoft’s computer scientists to store data. The DNA digital storage research is also been funded by a Top memory manufacturer Micron Technology to determine whether a nucleic acid–based system can expand the limits of electronic memory. This high inflow of money and interest could result to research and progress which could eventually drive down today’s prohibitively high costs and make DNA data storage possible within the decade, according to researchers.
Humans will generate more than 16 trillion gigabytes of digital data by 2017, and much of it will need to be archived: legal, financial and medical records as well as multimedia files. Data today is stored on hard drives, optical disks or tapes which are kept in energy-hogging, warehouse-size data centers. These media last anywhere from a few years to three decades at most. Microsoft Research computer architect Karin Strauss, says “we’re producing a lot more data than the storage industry is producing devices for, and projections show that this gap is expected to widen.”

if it is been kept cold and dry, it would last for centuries. Also, in theory it could pack billions of gigabytes of data into the volume of a sugar crystal. Magnetic tapes, today’s densest storage medium, hold up to 10 gigabytes in the same amount of space.
“DNA is an unbelievably dense, durable, nonvolatile storage medium,” these were the words of Olgica Milenkovic, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
That's because each of its four building-block molecules Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G) and Thymine (T), is only a cubic nanometer in volume. Using a coding system at its simplest, let's say A represents bits ‘00,’ C represents ‘01’ and so on, scientists can take the strings of 0s and 1s that form digital data files and design a DNA strand which maps an image or video. (Of course, the actual coding techniques scientists use are much more complex than this.) Synthesizing the designer DNA strand is the data-writing part. Scientists can then read the data by sequencing the strands.

In 2012, a Harvard University geneticist by name George Church jump-started the field by encoding 70 billion copies of a book one million gigabits in a cubic millimeter of DNA. The following year, researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute proved that they could read 739 kilobytes of data stored in DNA without any form of error.
Some teams have fully demonstrated functioning systems in the past year. In August researchers at E.T.H. Zurich encapsulated synthetic DNA in glass, and also exposed it to conditions simulating 2,000 years but accurately recovered it's coded data. Also, Milenkovic and her colleagues reportedstoring the Wikipedia pages of six U.S. universities in DNA and by allocating the sequences with special “addresses” selectively reading and editing parts of the written text. Such random access to data is vital to prevent having to “sequence a whole book in order to read one paragraph,” she says.

Microsoft’s Strauss, computer scientists Georg Seelig and Luis Ceze at the University of Washington in April gave a report of being able to write three image files, each a few tens of kilobytes, in only 40,000 strands of DNA using their own encoding scheme and then reading them individually without encountering errors. This work they presented at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in April. With the 10 million strands Microsoft is purchasing from Twist Bioscience, the team intends to show that DNA data storage can work on a much larger scale. “Our goal is to demonstrate an end-to-end system where we encode files to DNA, have the molecules synthesized, store them for a long time and then recover them by taking DNA out and sequencing it,” these were the words of Strauss. “Start with bits and go back to bits.”

Memory maker Micron is exploring DNA as a post-silicon technology. Work being done by Harvard’s Church and researchers at Boise State University to explore an error-free DNA storage system is being funded by the company. “The rising cost of data storage will require alternate solutions, and DNA storage is one of the more promising solutions,” so says Gurtej Sandhu, the director of Advanced Technology Development at Micron.
These researchers are still working on the error rates in encoding and decoding data.

Although, the major pieces of the technology are in place. Now, what is keeping us from having data vaults containing DNA-loaded glass capsules in shoe box-size is the Cost. “The writing process is about a million times too expensive,” Seelig says.
Here’s the reason: The process of Making DNA involves stringing together its nanometers-size molecules one after the other with high precision which is not an easy task. And although the cost of sequencing has fallen due to the booming demand for medical applications such as disease screening and diagnostics, DNA synthesis has not had a similar market driver. Milenkovic had to pay about $150 to get a string of 1,000 nucleotides synthesized. Sequencing a million nucleotides will costs about a cent.
The interest from Microsoft and Micron in data storage could be just the right impulse needed to start lowering costs, says Seelig.

New technologies such as microfluidics and nanopore DNA sequencing, which aid miniaturize and speed things up, will also be vital. Right now it takes some hours to sequence a few hundred nucleotide pairs and some days to synthesize them using multiple instruments and manual preparation of DNA. “You’d want all of this in a pretty small box, otherwise you’d lose the advantage of DNA’s storage density,” Seelig explains further.
If it all pans out, Microsoft’s Strauss visualizes companies offering archival DNA storage services within the next decade. “You could open your browser and upload files to their site or get your bytes back, which is similar to cloud storage,” according to her. Or, with as yet unrealized breakthroughs in DNA synthesis and sequencing, “one would purchase a DNA drive rather than purchasing a disk drive.”