Science & Technology

Scientists store and retrieve images in DNA

By T.K. Randall
April 10, 2016

Image: DNA Methylation
Credit: Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics / CC BY-SA 3.0 (adapted) Computer data storage mechanisms have been getting increasingly sophisticated in recent years and now researchers at the University of Washington have managed to take things one step further by using the very building blocks of life to store and retrieve digital data.

To accomplish this, the team needed to convert the binary values that make up the images in to the four basic building blocks of DNA - adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.

Once this was accomplished the researchers synthesized artificial DNA based on these values."Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works," wrote computer scientist Luis Ceze.

"It's very, very compact and very durable. We're essentially repurposing it to store digital data - pictures, videos, documents - in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years."

While it's unlikely that consumers will be using DNA-based hard drives anytime soon, the idea actually appears to work and could become more commonplace in the not-too-distant future.

Source: Gizmodo

Tags: DNA, Data, Computer