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ENTIRE WIZARD OF OZ NOVEL ENCODED ONTO STRANDS OF DNA

by Matthew Hart
Jul 15 2020 • 7:46 AM
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Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have encoded the entire novel,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, onto intertwined strands of DNA. The researchers say
that this is not only a demonstration of the capabilities of DNA storage. It’s
also a demonstration of the molecule’s ability to retain readable data even
after being damaged. Which makes one wonder if there’s… no place like genome for
storing information?

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The researchers outlined how they encoded L. Frank Baum’s classic—translated
into Esparanto—onto DNA in a paper recently published in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors of the paper, including
Associate Professor in Molecular Biosciences at UT Austin, Ilya Finkelstein, et
al., say that the big breakthrough with demonstration is that it worked even
after the data stored on the DNA was damaged.

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“The key breakthrough is an encoding algorithm that allows accurate retrieval of
the information even when the DNA strands are partially damaged during storage,”
Finkelstein said in an associated news post from UT Austin that comes via
Futurism. The researchers intentionally damaged their DNA storage device with
high temperatures and extreme humidity to test its capacity to retain all of Oz.




For those unfamiliar, DNA digital data storage is the process of using
synthesized strands of DNA to save binary data. It turns out that
Deoxyribonucleic acid—the molecule that carries the genetic instructions of all
known organisms—is an astoundingly good data storage device. DNA is so dense,
it’s about 5 million times more efficient than existing storage devices.

In the (unrelated) Microsoft Research video above, researchers at Microsoft and
the University of Washington explain the process of storing digital data on DNA
in more detail. And while the process is obviously complex, its core steps make
sense. Those steps are: take a data file’s binary code, encode those ones and
zeros as a sequence of nucleotide bases (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and
thymine), and then store that sequence of bases on DNA strands.

Zephyris

For a computer to read the data file stored on the DNA strands, the file is run
back through a device that can decode its sequence of nucleotide bases into
binary code. (Note that in the picture below, tens of thousands of gigabytes
worth of data can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of the
test tube.)

“This idea takes advantage of what biology has been doing for billions of years:
storing lots of information in a very small space that lasts a long time,”
Stephen Jones, a research scientist who collaborated on the project with
Finkelstein, said in the UT Austin post. He added that “DNA doesn’t take up much
space, it can be stored at room temperature, and it can last for hundreds of
thousands of years.” 


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Tara Brown Photography/University of Washington

While this particular experiment focused on DNA’s ability to retain readable
information after being damaged, other experiments have focused on simply
encoding large amounts of data. For example, in 2019, a startup company
announced that it had stored all of the text of Wikipedia’s English-language
version onto DNA.

Unfortunately, there are still serious limitations on DNA storage technology
that will likely keep it from being a practical option anytime soon. For
reference, it reportedly took Microsoft Research 21 hours to encode and then
decode and read the word “hello.” Which means that, for now, for the vast
majority of people, this tech will remain a fairytale.



via GIPHY

What do you think about researchers storing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on DNA?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments, pretties!



Featured Image: Library of Congress / togotv

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TAGGED: Genetics, DNA, wizard of oz, L. Frank Baum, Ilya Finkelstein


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