Abstergo Pursues DNA For Data Storage
Abstergo pushes forward in unlocking the full potential of DNA as a medium for data storage.The Future Technologies Division of Abstergo has been pursuing a variety of projects to improve computing power and data storage options as humanity generates an increasing amount of data as the years go by. Five years ago humans produced an estimated 4.4 zettabytes of data, an amount expected to explode to 160 zettabytes each year by 2025. Present infrastructure can only handle a fraction of that amount, which is expected to deplete Mundus' microchip-grade silicon as soon as the year 2040. "To solve this coming problem we've looked to nature and set ourselves upon the path of unlocking the data storage power of DNA," Abstergo CEO Patricius Bateson shared with the RBC whilst holding a 5ml vial. "For years we've been trying to innovate and figure out new technologies for data storage all while nature had already developed one some 3.5 billion years ago, and it's much more advanced than any storage device available to us: DNA."
Holding up a 5ml tube Mr. Bateson continued, "With DNA we could store over 1 billion gigabytes in the tube you see in my hand. Most data storage mediums we see today takes up a good deal of space and have a lifespan of, perhaps, ten years while becoming obsolete over time, increasing the danger that someday we may have these disks and tapes but no way to read the data which they contain. DNA does not have these limitations; DNA sequencing technologies may evolve but the
structure of DNA won't, making it a medium of eternal storage as the technology needed to read it back will never become obsolete. Data we encode in DNA today could be extracted at any time, be it twenty or a thousand years into the future, without the loss of any information whatsoever. And space? Imagine the entirety of the data upon Mundus, stored via DNA it will be much less than a cargo container."
Security, another concern when discussing data, is another 'feature' Mr. Bateson focused upon. "When you look at DNA as a medium for storage it is essentially hack proof; being used in physical form DNA storage is not hackable practically from any digital source. This is lucrative, of course, for sensitive areas such as national security, intelligence, and a multitude of other security applications. Now there do remain challenges, such as retrieving data, speed and such, but we're working on those, too."
At present it is expensive and slow to write data to DNA, which involves converting 0s and 1s to DNA molecules adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, while getting data back from DNA involves sequencing it and decoding files back to 0s and 1s. Finding and retrieving specific files stored on DNA is also a challenge. There is then the matter of random access, or the ability to selectively retrieve flies from DNA storage, without which you would need to sequence and decode an entire dataset to find and retrieve the few files you want. This is where Abstergo pursued a system under which it could create random access to reduce the amount of sequencing required.
In order to achieve random access the Future Technologies Division created a library of 'primers' that are attached to each DNA sequence. These primers, together with polymerase chain reaction (PCR), are used as targets to select desired snippets of DNA through random access. "So, prior to synthesizing the DNA containing data from a file, researches appended both ends of each DNA sequence with PCR targets from the primer library. They then used those primers later to select the desired strands through random access, and used a new algorithm designed to more efficiently decode and restore the data to its original, digital state" Bateson explained.
A new algorithm for decoding and restoring data more efficiently was also developed possessing more tolerance for errors in writing and reading DNA sequences, reducing the sequencing and processing required to recover information. Although it's not the first time random access on DNA had bee achieved Abstergo notes it is the first time it has been done at the scale they achieved. Abstergo researchers encoded to synthetic DNA a record 200MB of data consisting of 35 files ranging in size from 29kB to 44MB. The files contained high-definition video, audio, images, and text. They've also encoded and retrieved files from 400MB of data on DNA and believe that the approach utilized for random access will scale to physically isolated pools of DNA containing several terabytes each.
In conjunction with its DNA storage research, which Abstergo is calling Eternity Drive, it is also preparing to offer data hosting solutions "once Eternity Drive becomes more practical for day-to-day purposes."
