The book of DNA
Bioengineers printed a book on DNA molecules and successfully read it
DNA molecules are a reliable device for storing information, well protected from reading and writing errors. Scientists have been trying to adapt them to store arbitrary data since 1988, when American bioinformatics first managed to record 7.9 kilobytes of information on a DNA molecule and read it.
A group of scientists led by Sriram Kosuri from Harvard Medical School in Boston (USA) has developed a special computer algorithm that allows compressing and preparing an almost unlimited amount of information for recording on a DNA molecule.
According to this technique, the data is divided into pieces of the same length and recorded into short fragments of DNA with a length of 159 nucleotides. Each such block contains 96 bits of data, a 19-bit block address and two fragments of 22 bits each encoding the beginning and end of the "packet" of information. In each case, one nucleotide encodes one bit of data – the nitrogenous bases adenine (A) and cytosine (C) denote a logical "unit", and guanine (G) and thymine (T) denote a logical zero.
When recording information, blocks are synthesized from individual nucleotides using an inkjet DNA printer. The presence of an address for each block allows you to store information in the form of a mixture of short sequences of nucleotides, rather than a single DNA chain. This allows you to store an almost unlimited amount of information, increasing the length of the address part of the block.
Kosuri and his colleagues tested their algorithm in practice by "printing" an electronic version of the book "Regeneration: How Synthetic Biology will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves", written by a member of the group George Church (George Church) and writer Ed Regis (Ed Regis).
In total, the electronic version of the book contains 5,27 megabits (658 kilobytes) of information, including 53,5 thousand words, 11 pictures and 1 Java script. The scientists synthesized the necessary DNA fragments, mixed them, multiplied them and read them using the Illumina HiSeq sequencing device.
According to bioengineers, the coding algorithm turned out to be very effective – the book was read with only ten errors for 5.27 megabits of data.
According to the authors of the article, their technology has several other advantages besides unlimited recording length and error tolerance. Firstly, the use of nucleotides as single bits makes it possible to achieve an incredibly high recording density – 5.5 petabits per cubic millimeter. This is more than a similar characteristic for flash memory and hard drives by millions of times, and hundreds of times higher than the density of data recording in quantum holography.
Scientists believe that such characteristics of DNA memory can help it become one of the main ways to store information in archives and for other purposes that do not require quick access to data.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru17.08.2012