Dina Zielinski, senior human genome scientist at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, held up a small vial to the camera as she spoke to us on a video call from her home in Paris.
It was difficult to identify the object inside the vial, but he said that if I look closely at the object, I will see a clear and thin film at the bottom of the vial, which is ‘DNA’.
But this DNA is special. It is not the code of a human genome, nor the code of an animal or virus. Instead, it’s a digital artifact of a museum.
“It could easily last for hundreds of years,” says Dina.
In the past decade, there has been significant research into the sequencing of the human genome, DNA preparation and the discovery of genetic therapies, as well as the storage of data within DNA.
Scientists have encoded movies, books and even computer operating systems within DNA. Netflix has even used it to store an episode of its 2020 thriller series ‘Biohackers’.
The information stored in DNA is what makes humans human, and this is the case in other species as well. But many experts say that it is a very small, durable and long-term way to store data that can replace many of the unreliable digital storage mediums available to us today because they can be damaged regularly and it is difficult to store them. It requires a lot of energy.
Meanwhile, many experts are researching whether we can effectively secure data forever. One way to do this is to inscribe data on extremely strong glass beads, which would be a modern form of cave engraving.
But how long can this data really last and can we really store such a large amount of data in it?
At a time when our world is becoming more digitalized than ever, our dependence on data is increasing. Movies, photos, websites, business documents, critical security records, everything we use is digitized and we depend on it more than ever.
Most of the data we create is stored in the form of 0’s and 1’s on magnetic tapes like hard drives, but this is not an ideal method. First of all, demagnetization is a big problem.
Magnets lose their strength over time, so it’s important to rewrite hard drives every few years to keep data safe. “On average, it can last 10 to 20 years, and if you’re lucky and the conditions are favorable, it can last up to 50 years,” Zylinski says.
Storing data also requires huge data centers that require enormous amounts of energy to keep themselves cool, which is not good for an energy-crunched world. The problem is considered so serious around the world that even the US government’s Molecular Information Storage Program launched in 2019 is trying to find alternative energy sources for today’s massive data storage centers.
“We’re basically running out of hardware,” says Dina. I think the industry is not able to build hard disks and servers fast enough to store this data.
But do we really need to keep all this data and store it for so long?
People want to store data for a long period of time for many reasons. One is science. Researchers are generating vast amounts of data now more than ever before, and the more data they have, the better.
For example, radio telescopes and particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), generate huge amounts of data, and scientists use them to generate large amounts of data, says Lachizar Linkow, a computer scientist who works on DNA storage at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Want all these things to be safe. The Large Hadron Collider alone produces 90 petabytes (90 million gigabytes) of data each year.
Mark Bath, a professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-founded the startup Cache DNA to make biomolecules widely accessible and useful. Global threats to humanity compel us to preserve both human-made information, such as art and science, and the DNA of all living things on the planet, Bath says.
“That way if life is either recreated here or otherwise transferred or imported from other planets and so there will be a record of what we did, and what we had,” he says.
Many DNA storage researchers believe they have determined to develop the perfect storage medium for both extensive and incredibly long-term storage. We usually think of DNA as a way to store genomic information, but many researchers are now excited about the possibility of storing vast amounts of digital data that currently reside in data centers around the world. are becoming more than enough.
DNA is a natural selection here, says Bath. “For thousands of years, nature has used DNA to store information in the form of genomes,” he says. It’s pretty much safe (for billions of years), it’s something you can kind of depend on. As long as it’s a basic information storage medium for a species like humans, it’s going to be something we have to deal with.’
Contrast that with the fact that DNA has evolved over the past 3.7 billion years with the Information Age, which really began in the 1950s, Zelinsky says.
‘We’ve come a long way in man-made technology, but in terms of efficiency it’s not much better than DNA – when we start as a cell, all the instructions are there for each cell. Guide until you reach almost every single cell. There are 30 billion cells that make up a human being.
Also, the fact that we can recover fragments of DNA from millions of years old animals such as woolly mammoths that provide meaningful data about their genomes shows that, Zielinski says. DNA is incredibly durable. Half-life of DNA – the time it takes for it to decay by half. A well-preserved fossil is about 500 years old, which means that the DNA will no longer be readable after about 15 million years.
However DNA is incredibly fragile, and the conditions that lead to fossilization are extraordinarily rare. “There are so many ways to destroy it,” says Olga Melenkovic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Moisture, acids and radiation all damage DNA. ‘But if kept cool and dry, they can last for hundreds of years.
DNA can be preserved by encapsulating it inside other materials such as glass beads, mimicking how genetic material is preserved in ancient fossils. Robert Gross, a researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and his team have shown that these beads protect DNA from both chemicals and heat.
Locating it in a physically secure location can provide additional protection. Storing the most important data for humanity in DNA locked in a layer of ice could mean “it could last forever, for a very long time,” Melenkovic says.
Another great advantage of DNA is that it is an incredibly large store of information unmatched by any other human-made device. According to Linco, the estimated 33 zettabytes of data that humans will have generated by 2025 (that’s a number with 22 zeros after 3.3) can be stored in DNA storage the size of a ping-pong ball. A donation can be made.
He believes that storing this much information in DNA may be only a few decades away. Unlike other man-made storage media, DNA storage is unlikely to ever become obsolete.
‘Who among us still uses a floppy disk?’ asks Melenkowicz. ‘With DNA, we should always be able to read it. “With every human-made technology you need a new tool to read it,” says Zelinsky. If DNA becomes obsolete, then we have other problems to worry about.’