Wednesday, April 29, 2015 at 8:56AM

"From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes (1 exabytes = 1 billion gigabytes) of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days and the pace is accelerating."

-- Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google, August 4, 2010.

Where are we going to store the deluge of data everyone is warning us about? How about in a DNACloud that can store store 1 petabyte of information per gram of DNA?

Writing is a little slow. You have to convert your data file to a DNA description that is sent to a biotech company that will send you back a vile of synthetic DNA. Where do you store it? Your refrigerator.

Reading is a little slow too. The data can apparently be read with great accuracy, but to read it you have to sequence the DNA first, and that might take awhile.

The how of it is explained in DNACloud: A Tool for Storing Big Data on DNA (poster). Abstract:

The term Big Data is usually used to describe huge amount of data that is generated by humans from digital media such as cameras, internet, phones, sensors etc. By building advanced analytics on the top of big data, one can predict many things about the user such as behavior, interest etc. However before one can use the data, one has to address many issues for big data storage. Two main issues are the need of large storage devices and the cost associated with it. Synthetic DNA storage seems to be an appropriate solution to address these issues of the big data. Recently in 2013, Goldman and his collegues from European Bioinformatics Institute demonstrated the use of the DNA as storage medium with capacity of storing 1 peta byte of information on one gram of DNA and retrived the data successfully with low error rate [1]. This significant step shows a promise for synthetic DNA storage as a useful technology for the future data storage. Motivated by this, we have developed a software called DNACloud which makes it easy to store the data on the DNA. In this work, we present detailed description of the software.

Related Articles