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Hot Technologies in Storage
Continued from page: 5
Manu Priyam
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Bacteria-based Storage Right from the Labs
If atomic storage was not enough to baffle a common man's wit, these days we
are hearing talks of bacteria-based storage. Let's find out where the research
has reached.
We have heard researchers talk about atomic storage. The atoms can hold 250
Terabits of data on a surface area of one square inch. Then we also know about
the organic thin-film structures that can have more than 20,000
write-read-rewrite cycles. But, now researchers have started talking about the
potential of bacteria to store data. Sounds interesting? It is, and it's not
something out of science fiction.
State of research
Researchers from two prominent universities came out with results that
indicate the possibility of storing digital data in the genome of a living
organism. Not only that, the data thus stored could be retrieved after hundreds
or even thousands of years later. They believe that the potential capacity of
bacteria-based memory is enormous, as more than a billion bacteria are contained
in only a milliliter of liquid. You can assume the enormity.
To this effect a group of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
researchers described an experiment some three years ago in which they stored
roughly one encoded English sentence in one bacterium. Taking the same ahead,
earlier this year, scientists at Japan's Keio University Institute for Advanced
Biosciences reported similar results in their research. They claim that they
successfully encoded “e= mc2 1905!”-the Einstein's theory of relativity and the
year he enunciated it-on the common soil bacteria Bacillus subtilis.
According to the scientists, one of the challenges faced in carrying out the
research was to provide a safe haven for DNA molecules, which are easily
destroyed in any open environment inhabited by people or other hazards. The
solution for the fragility of DNAs was found in a living host for the DNA. The
host tolerates the addition of artificial gene sequences and survives extreme
environmental conditions. Also, the host with the embedded information had been
able to grow and multiply.
Potential applications
Storing is not the end of the story. If you have been able to store it on a
bacterium and have not been able to retrieve it successfully and also easily
then the purpose remains un-served. By now, the retrieval of the data remains a
wet-laboratory process requiring a certain amount of time and
effort.
Most of the potential applications for DNA-based data storage relate to the
core missions of the US Department of Energy (DoE), which funded the research
carried out at PNNL. Also the technology once developed could be used for other
security-related applications such as information-hiding and data steganography
to be used in commercial products, as well as those related to State security.
Data stenganography is the hiding of data inside other data. As the DNA-based
storage has the capability to survive nuclear threats, one of the possible
applications one could think of this kind of storage is to keep copies of data
that may be destroyed in a nuclear explosion. Anyways, who wants to talk about
nuclear explosion, that's insane! Page(s) 1 2 3 4 5 6
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