29 Mar GOODBYE HARD DISKS, DNA HAS ARRIVED
Is DNA the hard disk of the future? One gram of DNA has a capacity of 215 petabytes!
As the amount of information in the world doubles annually, the technology we use today to store digital data, such as USB or hard disk, could soon go into oblivion. The scientists are developing new data storage technology, and a fenomenal solution comes in the form of DNA molecule.
What makes DNA highly suitable gatekeeper for information is its density and stability, and the ability to save large amounts of data for thousands of years. Regardless of its length, a strand of DNA has four basic components: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine (A, T, G, C). If we assign the bases T and G value 1, and A and C value 0, then a large DNA strand becomes a binary memory record. In this way, DNA nucleotides become elements of digital system for data storage which can be read by DNA sequencing. Theoretically, it is estimated that one gram of DNA has a capacity of about 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes). In this way, all the digital data that is created by humanity could fit in one room of DNA.
For now, the biggest problem is reading data storage by sequencing DNA. It is estimated that the cost of this process will fall more than 100 times in the next year and that the DNA will become the primary method for long-term storage of large amounts of data.