MEXICO: A team of researchers this week announced that they can use DNA to store information for at least 2,000 years, and they’re now working on a filing system to make it easier to navigate.
The researchers, from ETH Zürich, an engineering, science and technology university, said DNA storage could preserve troves of historical texts, government documents or entire archives of private companies, all in a droplet.
The DNA storage findings, presented at an American Chemical Society conference, note that the double helix has two major advantages over hard drives and other forms of electronic storage: size and durability.
In their presentation, the researchers highlighted flaws in today’s electronic storage methods. For example, an external hard drive about the size of a paperback book can back up 5TB of data and might last 50 years.
“If you go back to medieval times in Europe, we had monks writing in books to transmit information for the future, and some of those books still exist,” Robert Grass, a professor with ETH said in a statement. “Now, we save information on hard drives, which wear out in a few decades.”
In theory, a fraction of an ounce of DNA could store more than 300,000 terabytes (1,000 gigabytes equals a terabyte).
The researchers pointed out that archaeological finds have shown that DNA from hundreds of thousands of years ago can still be sequenced today.
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