Complete Guide to DNA Storage, Its Advantages and Disadvantages

Technology is improving itself every movement; therefore we have a huge number of devices and obviously, associated data. The growing needs of humans are increasing the generation of data, and we entered have into the age of Big Data.  The storage and management of data are becoming a crucial task.   To cater to this problem, once again a technology comes ahead with a new innovation that is DNA data storage. DNA is the smallest unit of any living cell that works as a carrier of chromosomes and in this way they are solely responsible for transporting all qualities of a living body to its next generation.

The 23 pairs of a DNA can hold all major, minor or minute qualities of a living body, now all set to store the enormous amount of physical world data in it. It will be gone to change the face of data storage as well as the management.

The inability to handle the huge amount of data inspires the scientist of the New York Genome Centre to develop a program in which DNA can be encoded digitally. It will be the highest scale of data storage and will able to hold 215 petabytes in one gram of DNA. It’s really a massive amount of data and will be an interim solution for many decades.

How does it happen?

DNA of any living cell holds all information of building protein of that very creature. It is made up of a repetitive sequencing of Nucleic acids, i.e. Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine, collectively known as AGCT. It is also known as the base pair of DNA. Each pair is made up of three bases and forms amino acid which is the fundamental entity of any protein.  The data storage mythology of DNA is quite similar to hard drive data saving technique but with much -much high density and quantity.

Scientists are using different algorithm to encode data into these four bases by converting binary form of information into Nucleotides as 0s, and 1s is likely to be coded into A (Adenine), T (Thymine), C (Cytosine) and G (Guanine) in an arrangement where 00 is for A, 01 will be embedded in G, 10 is in C and 11 is going to T.

After the encoding of binary data into bases, the whole information is going to store by synthesized DNA structure and lastly finalized code sequencing is going to store into string droplets with the help of a random algorithm known as DNA Fountain with an additional tag which bug all droplets together.

  After the storage of data, now its time to retrieve data, there are many sequencing techniques are present like Oxford Nanopore portable (MinION) by which we can revive the data from DNA.

It is only the staring of a vast and critical diaspora of Data storage. DNA data storage might be a beneficial option but it is expensive and tough to crack and a long way to go.

NAM (nucleic acid memory) is the future of data storage, and it will take a long when you search a specific file in it from your desktop. 

Advantages of DNA data storage

1.     It is too compressed and compacted.

2.     It will remain as it is for thousands of years if kept in proper condition.

3.     It could be decoded till the human being can do so.

4.     It never spoils like CD/DVD and not degrades after a long time like a hard drive.

Disadvantages

1.     Cost inefficient

2.     It need advance hardware to access quickly.

Karen Minton is a Microsoft Office expert and has been working in the technical industry since 2002. As a technical expert, Karen  has written technical blogs, manuals, white papers, and reviews for many websites such as office.com/setup  .