DNA To Store And Retrieve Images

Scientists Successfully Use DNA to Store and Retrieve Images

Kelly Hodgkins | April 11, 2016

The University of Washington and Microsoft researchers have collaborated on an incredible project that will change data storage as we know it. The team has developed a way of storing data on DNA, which promises to dramatically reduce the storage size needed to save our files, images, and more. The team claims the technology would take a data center as large as a Walmart Supercenter and shrink it down to the size of the sugar cube you drop into your morning coffee. The research behind this stunning technology was presented this month at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.

Lee Organick, a UW computer science and engineering research scientist, mixes DNA samples for storage. Each tube contains a digital file, which might be a picture of a cat or a Tchaikovsky symphony. Source: http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/04/07/uw-team-stores-digital-images-in-dna-and-retrieves-them-perfectly/

<more at http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/dna-image-storage/; related links and articles: http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/04/07/uw-team-stores-digital-images-in-dna-and-retrieves-them-perfectly/ (UW team stores digital images in DNA — and retrieves them perfectly. April 7, 2016) and https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~luisceze/publications/dnastorage-asplos16.pdf (A DNA-Based Archival Storage System. James Bornholt, Randolph Lopez, Douglas M. Carmean, Luis Ceze, Georg Seelig and Karin Strauss. ASPLOS ’16 April 2–6, 2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2872362.2872397. [Abstract: Demand for data storage is growing exponentially, but the capacity of existing storage media is not keeping up. Using DNA to archive data is an attractive possibility because it is extremely dense, with a raw limit of 1 exabyte/mm3 (109 GB/mm3), and long-lasting, with observed half-life of over 500 years. This paper presents an architecture for a DNA-based archival storage system. It is structured as a key-value store, and leverages common biochemical techniques to provide random access. We also propose a new encoding scheme that offers controllable redundancy, trading off reliability for density. We demonstrate feasibility, random access, and robustness of the proposed encoding with wet lab experiments involving 151 kB of synthesized DNA and a 42 kB randomaccess subset, and simulation experiments of larger sets calibrated to the wet lab experiments. Finally, we highlight trends in biotechnology that indicate the impending practicality of DNA storage for much larger datasets.])>