DNA for Microsoft
Microsoft has purchased 10 million strands of synthetic DNA
Anatoly Alizar, Giktimes based on Twist Bioscience: Twist Bioscience Announces Microsoft Purchase of its Synthetic DNA for Digital Data Storage Research
Microsoft Corporation buys 10 million strands of synthetic DNA from the biological startup Twist Bioscience. This amount of biomaterial is required to check whether it is suitable for long-term storage of information.
The density of information in DNA has long attracted the attention of scientists: 1 zettabyte (billion terabytes) of data is placed in one gram of DNA and stored unchanged for thousands of years under appropriate conditions. It's a small matter: to learn how to read and write information cheaply and reliably.
In the past years, successful experiments have repeatedly been carried out with the recording of binary data into DNA base pairs. Back in 2010, biologists from Hong Kong managed to introduce synthetic DNA into the cell of the E.coli bacterium, and in 2012, scientists from Harvard recorded 643 kilobytes of data in DNA, setting a new record for the amount of recorded information.
To encode information in DNA, a quaternary number system is used, according to the number of nucleotides
(0 = A, 1 = T, 2 = C, 3 = G).
For example, experts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong translated text into numbers using the ASCII table
(i = 105; G = 71; E = 69; M = 77),
then into the quaternary system
(105 → 1221; 71 → 0113; 69 → 0111; 77 → 0131),
and then into the nucleotide chain:
iGem → 1221011301110131 → ATCTATTGATTTATGT
Specialists from Harvard used a different method. Firstly, they basically abandoned the use of living organisms, and introduced synthetic DNA into a molecule generated on a commercial DNA chip. Thus, the recorded information cannot be lost due to genetic mutations during the evolution of the host organism. Secondly, they did not use ASCII text, but binary code – a file with a book, preserving HTML formatting and JPEG illustrations. The code was divided into 96-bit blocks, including a 19-bit unique address of each block (shown in red in the diagram).
Since then, data encoding methods have been gradually improved. The technology of reading information from DNA was also improved. Researchers from Microsoft Research also made their contribution: they recently published a scientific paper on this topic.
Twist Bioscience specializes in technologies for recording information in DNA using a special machine for the mass production of synthetic DNA, which was designed by the company. Twist Bioscience's main clients are research laboratories that manufacture genetically modified bacteria required in certain chemical reactions for the production of specific drugs. The use of genetic material for information storage is a new direction in the activities of Twist Bioscience.
Custom-made synthetic DNA of a given configuration costs about 10 cents for a pair of bases. Twist Bioscience expects to reduce the price to 2 cents in the near future.
"They tell us the DNA sequence, we produce the chain from scratch," said Emily Leproust, executive director of Twist Bioscience, about the contract with Microsoft. The manufactured biomaterial is sent to Microsoft, while Twist Bioscience bioengineers do not even know what specific information is encoded in the molecules, since they do not have a key to decrypt.
In the laboratory, with the help of artificial aging, Microsoft will check whether DNA will retain information for 1000 years.
Reading information from DNA is performed by genetic sequencing. Over the past 20 years, the cost of this procedure has decreased significantly. For example, the human genome sequencing project lasted from 1993 to 2003 and cost about $3 billion. Today, such a procedure can be performed for $ 1000.
If the price drop continues at such a pace and it is possible to reduce the level of reading errors, then DNA can really be considered as an acceptable information carrier. It is necessary to reduce prices by another 10,000 times – and the technology will go to the masses, Emily Leprust is sure.
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29.04.2016