Heralding The Future of Data Storage Technology: An Introduction to the Evolution Of DNA Data Storage

blessing97 (54)in #stemng • 6 years ago

No doubt you would agree with me that living in this digital age has it's numerous perks, as we now have more access to numerous mind blowing technological inventions and creations. But besides the ton of advantages associated with being a part of this technologically advanced digital age, it has also brought about several inevitable drawbacks and disadvantages, of which the problem and issue of data storage comes to mind as it is fast becoming an increasingly tasking and difficult problem to solve. Scientific research has shown that in 2020 the entire digital universe will have a humongous size of 44 trillion gigabytes(source). Well, that is a whole lot of zeroes and data to comprehend, but the really important and challenging question is; how on earth will we be able to effectively store and efficiently preserve such a mind-boggling amount of data? Of course flash and hard drives won't cut it here, but the point is, over the past few decades, our data storage needs have been multiplied tremendously by unbelievable numbers with each and every passing year, as seen in a recent study which showed that the amount of data produced by humans increases by a factor of ten(10) every five(5) years including our photos, songs, videos and the likes (source). And since apps like facebook, whatsapp, twitter, instagram, snapchat and so on are here to stay for the long term, that means even more pictures and videos every day which further equates to even more data. And the more the data, then the more the capacity of the storage devices needed to accommodate or house such amounts of data.

To put these figures into perspective, remember 10-15 years ago when you were very content and happy with your 1 or 2 gigabyte memory card back then? Well, imagine being stuck with a 1gigabyte memory card on your iphone or android device. One can only imagine how frustrating and annoying such an experience would be right now. Humans have thus continued to hunger and thirst for devices with even more higher data storage capabilities in recent years, and there seems to be no end to this "digital craze". But it may really interest you to know that a long term solution is already in the works, and that solution is the use of DNA molecules to store and retrieve large chunks of data on the go. But what exactly does this DNA storage entail and what is it really about?

What Is DNA Data Storage?

DNA which is short for Deoxyribonucleic acid is a molecule located in the cell nucleus which houses hereditary materials necessary for the growth and development of a particular living organism including humans, animals and plants. It is therefore said to store biological information necessary for life. Humans have thus decided to take a page off mother nature's book(maybe even a whole chapter) in order to exploit and employ this tactic to store digital data due to DNA's unique data storage capabilities.

Unlike traditional and modern day storage devices which make use of the magnetic and electrical properties of materials to store data, DNA data storage uses it's nucleotide sequence to achieve this, where a nucleotide is a sequence chain consisting of even smaller molecules which are further broadly classified into two groups which are; Adenine, Cytosine, Thymine and Guanine(or simply A, C, T and G for short). To achieve the feat of data storage on DNA strands, digital data patterns are generally assigned to these DNA nucleotides. For example 00 could be assigned to the Adenine(A) molecule, 01 to the Cytosine(C) molecule, 10 and 11 assigned both to the Thymine (T) and Guanine(G) molecules respectively. This format or sequence can then be used to store various types of data; be it pictures, songs, videos and so on. For example if a picture is to be stored as a digitally encoded file e.g a JPEG file, the file would consist of a long chain of 0's and 1's which can then be paired into two bit pairs each. So if the first eight bits of the JPEG file are 01111000, they can be paired in two bit pairs which would then be 01 11 10 00 which on a closer look corresponds to the earlier values assigned to the A, C, T and G molecules already previously mentioned above. This thus forms the basis for joining the nucleotide molecules into DNA strands which in turn forms the basis for DNA data storage.

Scientists have been storing and encoding data in DNA for several decades, with the University of Washington and Microsoft currently holding the world record for the largest amount of data stored in and retrieved from DNA, a figure which currently sits at 200 Megabytes(MB) which may not seem like much at first, until you realize that it costs almost $10,000 to encode(synthesize and read) just two megabytes(2MB) of data(source). That's roughly the same data storage capacity of a 3.5-inch floppy disk for the price of 3000steem as at the time of writing. And who knows, the price of steem may still yet increase further even before I finish composing this article. So it's really expensive to encode data into DNA, but besides it's costly nature, DNA storage has proved to be very effective.

Apart from the fact that DNA storage is still in it's early infant and experimental stage, coupled with it's relatively high cost which is a major drawback, DNA data storage still provides several advantages over traditional or modern day data storage techniques. Some of these advantages include the fact that 1 gram of DNA could potentially store 215 petabytes or 215 million gigabytes of data, which is an extremely large and almost incomprehensible amount or figure. In principle, this means that 1 gram of DNA could store every current single piece of data here on earth. Apart from the aforementioned advantage, DNA is also highly ultracompact and non-degradable(unlike CD's and magnetic tapes) and as such can last hundreds and thousands of years, so long as it is stored properly and in the right conditions.

Although DNA data storage technology is still in it's infant and experimental stage, and also the ways of reading, writing, storing and retrieving data to and from DNA molecules must be improved upon significantly, DNA storage has the full potential to overtake today's traditional data storage technology while overcoming and improving upon it's few shortcomings in order to maximize it's full benefits and potential, so as to become the world's primary means of storing important data over relatively long periods of time.