Hold your breath, we might be in for a paradigm shift in
the domain of Information Technology. If you give it a bit ( pun intended) of thought, Genetically
Engineered Information Technology, is
not new at all, and in fact is as old
as life itself. Sixty years ago, Watson and Crick unraveled the mystery of the DNA double helix, its enormous capacity for information coding as well as storage and
replication. So technically speaking you and I are
Dynamic Information Storage, Retrieval, Application Systems. Yes, Dynamic indeed; information is
constantly being upgraded; reprocessed, put into use............... without even having to press any UPDATE/ delete
button. . Of course there is a hitch: convenient and selective loss of memory.
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| DNA Double Helix |
Quite a lot happened during the last 60 years. We were initially
quite taken aback to note that a mere 4 letter code says all that is to be said
in the Universe. Strange indeed, but haven’t we ourselves admitted long back
that Truth is stranger than Fiction ? Speaking, reading and writing a language requires increasing levels of capability and sure enough we mastered the DNA language, learned to decode the mysterious messages and and write
some of our own. Genetically modified brinjal being an example. And now we are
all set to exploit this new method in
the IT world. We have learned that DNA
is practically indestructible and even after
millions of years the stored information
can be retrieved. Logically , then why can't we do away with the current data storage devices and switch to DNA ?
With this idea in mind, Nick Goldman with
his team at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Hinxton U.K
collaborated with those at the Agilent Technologies Genomics
Lab at Santa Clara, California. They have
come up with a practical guide to exploiting the universality and robustness of DNA as an information storage system. To
prove beyond doubt the versatility and efficacy of their method the team chose
5 different forms of data: ASCII
text of all of Shakespeare’s sonnets,
MP3 format of the 26 minute’s speech of
Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech,
and .pdf format of Watson & Cricks famous 1953 Nature paper on DNA
double helix and a .jpg photo file of the
EMBL building summing upto little less
than 800 kilobytes. Nick Goldman told BBC
that one gram of DNA can store up to 2 petabytes of information the
equivalent of 3 million CDs. Their
research paper is published in Nature
Magazine online on 23 January 2013. As
Dr Ewan Birney another team member opined
to the BBC “ One of the great properties of DNA is that you don’t need any electricity to store it. If you keep
it cold dark and dry, DNA lasts for a very long time” – Didn’t Jurrassic Park tell us precisely
that? So unlike the conventional storage devices DNA
storage system will not demand constant attention.
Can this synthetic IT DNA t in anyway interfere with
Nature’s life code? The team sets at rest, our
apprehensions. Goldman told the BBC that
though it uses the 4 letters
ATGC, “ The IT DNA uses a completely different code to what the cells of living bodies use”
References :
Nature Magazine published online 23rd January 2013.
References :
Nature Magazine published online 23rd January 2013.
