Smash Notes
How we can store digital data in DNA | Dina Zielinski
From floppy disks to thumb drives, every method of storing data eventually becomes obsolete. What if we could find a way to store all the world's data forever? Bioinformatician Dina Zielinski shares the science behind a solution that's been around for a few billion years: DNA.
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Notes
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On TED Talks Daily, Dina Zielinski says IBM released the first hard drive in 1956. She describes it being loaded for shipping in front of a small audience. It held about as much as one MP3 and weighed more than a ton, at roughly 10,000 dollars a megabyte. She reaches that machine by stepping back from a 1984 TED talk in which a Sony executive explained the compact disc, and she notes that thirty years after that talk people were still discussing digital storage. Her point is that storage keeps changing because every medium eventually wears out or becomes obsolete.
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Because the devices have evolved dramatically. All media eventually becomes obsolete. Digital storage has become expensive and none of our devices stand against the test of time.
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There is a solution that has been around for billions of years. DNA is nature’s oldest storage device. It contains all the necessary information to build and maintain a human being.
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DNA can store a ton of information in a minuscule space. DNA is also more durable and it does not require electricity to store it.
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By first learning to sequence, or read DNA. After, how to write or synthesize it. Anything that can be stored as 0s and 1s can be stored in DNA. Once sequenced and transferred, we have the ability to read, write, and copy DNA.
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On TED Talks Daily, Dina Zielinski says DNA outlasts man-made devices, but it is not perfect. You recover a stored message by sequencing the DNA, and every retrieval uses up some of that DNA, because loss is part of sequencing. Sequencing also writes errors into the A's, T's, C's, and G's. Copying the DNA is cheaper than synthesizing it again. Her team made about 200 trillion copies of their files and got the data back. To live with the errors, they borrowed an algorithm used for streaming video, which also has to rebuild an original file from enough zeros and ones.
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