Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Microsoft believe they have set a new world record for the amount of digital data successfully stored in and retrieved from DNA molecules.
The team encoded and decoded a video of the band OK Go, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, the top 100 books of Project Gutenberg, and the Crop Trust's seed database, among other data, all on strands of DNA.
In an interview, UW professor Luis Ceze, one of the lead researchers for the project, says, "the world is producing data at an incredible rate, and storage technologies need to keep up."
Ceze says the team stored 200 megabytes of data. "This experiment led to several important breakthroughs that improved our ability to manipulate more complex pools of synthetic DNA," he notes. "It allowed us to better understand what kinds of errors crop up and how to deal with them."
The researchers developed error-correcting codes to reliably retrieve data using their algorithms. They also developed a method for selectively reading only the data they want and not the entire dataset, using polymerase chain reactions specifically to amplify only the desired data.
From UW Today
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