Digital Preservation: “DNA ‘Perfect for Digital Storage'”
The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare’s sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the “life molecule”.
The information was then read back out with 100% accuracy.
It is possible to store huge volumes of data in DNA for thousands of years, the researchers write in Nature magazine.
[Clip]
The group cites government and historical records as examples of data that could benefit from the molecular storage option.
Much of this information is not required every day but still needs to be kept. Once encoded in DNA, it could be put away safely in a vault until it was needed.
DNA representation The coding used the same four “letters”, or bases, but in a language living cells would not understand
And unlike other storage media presently in use such as hard disk-drives and magnetic tapes, the DNA “library” would not demand constant maintenance.
Read the Complete Article
Filed under: Data Files, Digital Preservation, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Preservation
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
ADVERTISEMENT
Archives
ADVERTISEMENT