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What Practical Problems Does Dina Zielinski Describe in Storing Data in DNA?

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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How we can store digital data in DNA | Dina Zielinski ·

TED Talks Daily

More from this episode

  1. When Was the First Hard Drive, According to Dina Zielinski?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.
  2. Why Has Digital Data Become a ProblemBecause the devices have evolved dramatically. All media eventually becomes obsolete.
  3. How Can We Store All of Our Data TimelesslyThere is a solution that has been around for billions of years. DNA is nature’s oldest storage device.
  4. What Makes DNA So GreatDNA can store a ton of information in a minuscule space. DNA is also more durable and it does not require electricity to store it.
  5. How Do We Store Data on DNABy 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.

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