DNA AS A STORAGE DEVICE

Scrolls thousands of years old provide us with a glimpse into long-forgotten cultures and the knowledge of our ancestors. In this digital era, in contrast, a large part of our knowledge is located on servers and hard drives. It will be a challenge for this data to survive 50 years, let alone thousands of years (Grass et al.; 2015). The demand for storing more and more data is increasing day by day. In 2012, the total digital information in the world was about 2.7 zettabytes; with every passing year it is outgrown by its predecessor by 50% (Shrivastava and Badlani, 2013). The journey of data storage began from Rocks, Bones, Paper, Punched Cards, Magnetic Tapes, Drums, Films, Gramophone records Floppies etc. Data storage has in the present scenario extended to optical discs including CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs to Portable hard drives and USB flash drives. But all of these techniques are prone to obsolescence and decay. Moreover, Silicon and the other non-biodegradable materials pollute the environment, are limited in resources and would exhaust one day.
Nature has been frugal in its use of information storage techniques (Schrödinger, 1944). Blueprints of life, both of plant and of animal, are stored in the DNA molecules (Dawkins, 1986). The human immune system stores information about past pathogens in the form of primed lymphocytes (e.g., T-cells and B-cells), using this information to mass-produce and rapidly deploy antibodies and specialized immune cells when an old pathogen reappears (Crick, 1994).

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