In our today's modern and technologically developed world, the limitations of storing binary data has been crossed the values of megabytes and gigabytes. Now it enters an new era of terabytes and petabytes storage. But still we haven't any well developed and conventional hardware for storing data of thousands of terabytes. There are some of devices that can only store hundreds of terabytes but they are very costly. As of now, the largest hardware component for storing tremendous amount of binary data is 100TB of solid state drive(SSD) and it will cost you $40,000. Is there any other type of technology that can store more binary data than these hardwares? Well yes, there is a developing technology that can store hundreds of terabytes of binary data.
A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data, that is around 700 terabytes in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times. This could be a revolutionary change in the storage scheme of binary data. They only used a gram of DNA and stored 700TB. If you want to store this amount of data using today' hardwares, you have to need a full building of costly data storage Devices. But how they did this?
How they store data in the DNA?
They genetically engineer that DNA molecule by embedding different nucleotide codes there. By doing this, they stored 700TB of binary data in a gram of DNA molecule. As we know that our data is stored in the binary language i.e. of 0,1 language. They engineered the nucleotide codes according to these digits and developed a whole molecule of DNA.
How they read data from DNA?
They simply sequence that nucleotide codes. There are different type of computational techniques used to determine the sequence of a DNA. After sequencing, all nucleotides shown in their codes like AGCTACGTTGAC.....so on. This sequence can be converted into binary digits like 101011000101.....so on. The lenght of DNA molecule is so long and it consist of thousands of nucleotides. So it can be used to store tremendous number of images, videos, documents and other data in the form of binary digits.
DNA vs Blue ray Discs / Hard drive
Let us compare this storage medium with blue ray discs storage. Here only a gram of DNA can store 700TB, which means that 700TB of data only in a small droplet of DNA. On the other hand, to store 700TB of data you have to need 14,000 discs of 50GB. So it is conventionally more significant than the today's storage techniques. DNA can also be stored for hundred of thousands years in vacuum. So it can be easily stored in a vacuumed box in your garage. If you want to store this amount of data in hard drive, you have to need 35 hard drives of 20TB. It will costs you around $22,000.
So overall this medium of data storage is more convenient and significant. In future if this technique will develop properly, we can easily store the images, videos and documents of our whole life in a beaker of DNA.
