UW team stores digital images in DNA — and retrieves them perfectly

[progressoid]

A DNA-Based Archival Storage System


Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard.

But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.

All the movies, images, emails and other digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10,000 gigabytes) can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube.Tara Brown Photography/ University of Washington

In a paper presented in April at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, the team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.

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In one experiment outlined in the paper, the team successfully encoded digital data from four image files into the nucleotide sequences of synthetic DNA snippets. More significantly, they were also able to reverse that process — retrieving the correct sequences from a larger pool of DNA and reconstructing the images without losing a single byte of information.

one of the images stored and retrieved

...http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/04/07/uw-team-stores-digital-images-in-dna-and-retrieves-them-perfectly/

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bornholt/dnastorage-asplos16/

[DetlefK]

1. Why am I thinking of cyberpunk-novels like "Neuromancer" and "Cyberskin"?

Things Neuromancer predicted
- Internet, online-forums and social media - check
- cybernetic implants - check
- data stored in synthetic DNA - check


AI?
Corrupt corporations taking over the world?
Transfering consciousness into a computer?
We'll see.

[progressoid]

2. By the time we get to transferring consciousness into a computer,

I think my brain will be pretty worn out.

[DetlefK]

3. Maybe not spend this much time in "GD:Primaries"?

[progressoid]

6. Good advice.

[brett_jv]

4. This is f'ing incredible ... I had no clue this was even possible.

I wonder how much it costs to store data this way vs. current technologies. Obviously the first project to do so would be expensive but if it could eventually be cheaply mass-produced, it has seriously 'game changing' possibilities. Imagine if the entire world just needed one 'server' that was a big tub of DNA somewhere, and when it gets 'full', we just add a squirt more to the tub and suddenly there's 1,000 more Petabytes available to humanity ... that would be amazing.

[progressoid]

5. It'll make these huge data facilities look like horse and buggy technology.

[DetlefK]

7. What if it gets out of control? What if cat-pics start spreading like cancer?