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 In past centuries, books and scrolls preserved the knowledge of
our ancestors, even though they were prone to damage and
disintegration. In the digital era, most of humanity's collective
knowledge is stored on servers and hard drives. But these have a
limited lifespan and need constant maintenance.
Scientists from ETH Zurich have taken inspiration from the natural
world in a bid to devise a storage medium that could last for
potentially thousands of years. They say that genetic material found
in fossils hundreds of thousands of years old can be isolated and
analyzed as it has been protected from environmental stresses.
"(The) fascination of having this very, extremely old information -
a hundred thousand years, older than anything else humanity knows -
in DNA. So it kind of tells us that it's a really stable material
which can endure nature or the environment for a very long time,"
said Dr. Robert Grass, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich's Department
of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences.
In order to protect information-bearing DNA they encapsulated it in
a synthetic 'fossil' shell made from a microscopic silica glass
particle with diameter of roughly 150 nanometers.
 "We looked at ways of stabilizing DNA, and we developed a method of
encapsulating DNA into small glass particles. And we've shown that
in these particles traces are more stable, these DNA traces are more
stable than they are otherwise in the environment," added Grass.
The researchers say that encapsulation in silica is roughly
comparable to that of fossilized bones. The long-term stability of
the DNA can be estimated by comparisons to other DNA storage
facilities, such as Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where
genetic material is stored at minus 18 degrees Celsius and can
survive for more than a million years.
To demonstrate the technology, the researchers encoded in DNA "The
Methods of Mechanical Theorems" written by ancient Greek scientist
Archimedes at least two thousand years ago. Grass explained how his
team devised a method for translating the written word into DNA. "We
decide how a letter is translated to a sequence of, let's say,
nucleotides - so the building blocks of DNA. And so we then generate
an enormous file that instead of letters and spaces and numbers,
it's just a sequence of A, C, T and G," he said. "This file we send
to a company and that company synthesizes that DNA according to our
file we sent them. So they then synthesize DNA sequences with
exactly the sequence of the nucleotides that we predefined."
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They then simulated the degradation of the DNA over a long period of
time by storing it at a temperature between 60 and 70 degrees
Celsius for up to a month, replicating the chemical degradation that
takes place over hundreds of years within a few weeks. The glass
shells turned out to be particularly robust and, through the use of
a fluoride solution, the DNA could be easily separated from the
glass so the information can be read.
Successfully decoding the DNA-encoded information required a built
in fail-safe mechanism. New algorithms designed by Reinhard Heckel
from ETH Zurich's Communication Technology Laboratory added extra
layers of information to the actual data so that it was still
accurate and error-free even if one part of the data got lost or
shifted.
Despite proving the technology at their lab in Zurich, the team
concedes that viable DNA data storage will need significant
investment to become a reality. While the hardware to decode the DNA
has become cheaper, the cost of actually manufacturing DNA with the
information encoded inside is still very expensive. Grass said it
will take investment from governments and large corporations to make
it possible.
But he added that the prospect of storing mankind's collective
knowledge in a sprinkling of synthetic DNA could eventually mean
information security for future generations.
"If you, for example, think of a tablespoon filled with DNA; that
would include all of the information on Facebook and Wikipedia and
Twitter - and all that just in that small heap of DNA. Whereas
nowadays you need enormous server farms and cooling and maintenance
because the current methods decay over time," said Grass.
"In that tablespoon you would have everything very stable in a very
small space with a guaranteed stability for a very long time."
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