In homage to Jurassic Park, researchers store DNA in amber-like polymer
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Could be used to solve long term digital data storage problems too
iconDan Robinson
Mon 17 Jun 2024 // 17:01 UTC
Boffins at MIT have come up with an amber-like polymer that can be used to preserve DNA, which could allow it to be used for long term storage of information, such as genomes or digital data.
The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they were inspired by the movie Jurassic Park, in which DNA is extracted from creatures preserved in amber and used to create a population of long-extinct dinosaurs.
However, they were looking for something a bit more convenient than amber. The polymer they came up with can be used to store DNA sequences encoding data such as the theme music from Jurassic Park, as well as an entire human genome, they claim, while the DNA can easily be removed from the polymer without damaging it.
But as with other DNA storage methods, actually storing the data takes several hours and retrieving it is also slow and cumbersome.
DNA has been explored as a way of storing information for some time, as it potentially offers high storage density; in theory, a coffee mug full of DNA could store all of the world’s data, MIT claims. And depending how it is stored, it could have much greater longevity than many of today's archive technologies.
Current methods for storing DNA typically require freezing, so are impractical because of the energy required, while MIT’s newly developed polymer can store DNA at room temperature while also protecting it from damage caused by heat or water, according to a report in MIT News.
"Freezing DNA is the number one way to preserve it, but it’s very expensive, and it's not scalable," James Banal, a former MIT postdoc and one of the researchers involved, is quoted as saying. "I think our new preservation method is going to be a technology that may drive the future of storing digital information on DNA."
A research paper was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/17/ ... er_storage