Monday, February 11, 2013

And Here Comes Genetically Engineered IT


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. 
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.