University of Washington researcher Lee Organick (foreground) and Microsoft researcher Yuan-Jyue Chen (background) work in the Molecular Information Systems Lab. (UW Photo / Dennis Wise)
Scientists from the University of Washington and Microsoft are improving their system for preserving digital data in strands of synthetic DNA — and they’re giving you the chance to participate.
For the experiment described in the paper, text files as well audio, images and a high-definition music video featuring the band OK Go were first digitally encoded, and then converted into chemical coding — that is, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine, which make up the ATCG alphabet for DNA base pairs.
Using magnetic properties of conductive thread, University of Washington researchers can store data in fabric. In this example, the code to unlock a door is stored in a patch and read by magnetometers. Commercial products would almost certainly look more stylish. (UW Photo / Dennis Wise)
Want to wear your password on your sleeve? Computer scientists from the University of Washington can make it so.
A research team led by UW’s Shyam Gollakota has demonstrated a method for encoding digital data, including ID tags and security keys, into electrically conductive threads that can be woven invisibly into items of clothing.
“This is a completely electronic-free design, which means you can iron the smart fabric or put it in the washer and dryer,” Gollakota, an associate professor at UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, said today in a news release. “You can think of the fabric as a hard disk — you’re actually doing this data storage on the clothes you’re wearing.”
This output from a sequencing machine includes the University of Washington team’s exploit, which is being sequenced with a number of unrelated strands. Each dot represents one strand of DNA in a given sample. (UW Photo / Dennis Wise)
To prove their point, the researchers turned a snippet of malicious computer code into a string of synthetic DNA, and then used it to take control of a computer that was programmed to search for patterns in the raw files that emerge from DNA sequencing.
They also found known security gaps in many of the open-source software programs that are used to analyze DNA sequencing data.
This is a top-view depiction of a single layer of chromium triiodide. Chromium atoms are depicted in gray, with iodine atoms in purple. (UW / MIT Illustration / Efren Navarro-Moratalla)
For the first time, researchers have discovered magnetism in the two-dimensional realm of monolayers, or materials that consist of a single atomic layer.
The material, known as chromium triiodide or CrI3, could play a role in new types of memory devices with faster data processing speeds.
A team led by researchers from the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published their results this week in the journal Nature.
The University of Washington’s Luis Ceze and Lee Organick prepare DNA containing digital data for sequencing. (UW Photo / Tara Brown Photography)
Twist Bioscience says it’s extending its collaboration with Microsoft and the University of Washington on a project aimed at perfecting a process for encoding digital data in DNA molecules.
In a news release issued today, San Francisco-based Twist said Microsoft will purchase 10 million strands of synthetic DNA from the company for use in future experiments. The deal comes more a year after an initial purchase of the same number of strands for data storage.
“After working together for over a year, the organizations have improved storage density, thereby reducing the cost of DNA digital data storage by encoding more data per strand and increasing the throughput of DNA production,” Twist said.
An atomic memory grid shows how a passage from physicist Richard Feynman’s famous lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” was encoded using chlorine atoms on a copper surface. The grid is 96 nanometers wide and 126 nanometers deep. (Credit: TU Delft)
Researchers have stored and read out a kilobyte’s worth of data using the world’s smallest hard disk – a speck of copper that stores the bits on chlorine atoms – and they say the technology could someday hold vast amounts of data in a minuscule space.
The team says they reached a storage density of 500 trillion bits per square inch, which is 500 times better than the best commercial hard disk currently available.
“In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp,” Sander Otte, a researcher at Delft University’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands, said in a news release.
The pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube can store incredible amounts of encoded digital data. (Credit: Tara Brown Photography / University of Washington)
Computer scientists from Microsoft and the University of Washington say they’ve set a new standard for DNA storage of digital data – but they acknowledge that the standard won’t last long.
But Karin Strauss, the principal Microsoft researcher on the project, acknowledges that so much more is theoretically possible.
“You could pack an exabyte of data in an inch cubed,” she told GeekWire. An exabyte is equal to 8 quintillion bits of information, which is much more information than is contained in the Library of Congress. (Exactly how much more? That’s a matter of debate.)
All the movies, images and other data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10 terabytes) can be stored in the pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube. (Credit: Tara Brown Photography / UW)
Researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft are developing a digital storage system that can archive data in DNA molecules, with the random-access readability and error correction protocols that’d be required for real-world applications.
Once they’ve overcome those hurdles, they just have to figure out how to make the technology affordable. Eventually, such research could help open the way for data storage devices that can pack information millions of times more tightly than current silicon-based methods.
“Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works — it’s very, very compact and very durable,” Luis Ceze, UW associate professor of computer science and engineering, said in a news release. “We’re essentially repurposing it to store digital data — pictures, videos, documents — in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years.”
Ceze and his colleagues describe their work in a paper presented this week in Atlanta at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, or ASPLOS.
A 3-D animation shows how DNA can be used in computational devices. (Credit: Microsoft Research)
Data storage is getting better and better, but the final frontier for the long-term preservation of digital bits may well be DNA molecules – and the University of Washington and Microsoft Research are trying to make it so.
Such a system would take advantage of DNA’s amazing information storage capability – the kind of capability that’s able to hold all the genetic code for any organism in a single cell. The Times notes that all of the world’s digital information could be stored in about 2.4 gallons (9 liters) of solution, which would fit inside a typical water cooler bottle.
The benefits of such a system not only include being able to put a lot of data in a small space, but also being able to preserve the data for millennia under the right conditions.
