Operating System, a Movie and a Computer Virus on DNA

https://watchermeet-up.forumotion.com/post?f=2&mode=newtopicScientists Store an


Operating System, a Movie and a Computer Virus on DNA
Published: March 4, 2017

Source: The Hacker News

Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years. Just last year, Microsoft purchased 10 Million strands of synthetic DNA from San Francisco DNA synthesis startup called Twist Bioscience and collaborated with researchers from the University of Washington to focus on using DNA as a data storage medium. However, in the latest experiments, a pair of researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) have come up with a new technique to store massive amounts of data on DNA, and the results are marvelous. The duo successfully stored 214 petabytes of data per gram of DNA, encoding a total number of six files, which include:

• A full computer operating system
  
• An 1895 French movie "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat"
  
• A $50 Amazon gift card
  
• A computer virus
  
• A Pioneer plaque
  
• A 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon
  

The new research, which comes courtesy of Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, has been published in the journal Science.
But How Did the Researchers Store Digital Data on DNA?
Calling their process a "DNA Fountain," the researchers first compressed all the data into a single master archive and split it into short strings of binary digits, made up of ones and zeros.
Next, the duo used an "erasure-correcting algorithm called fountain codes" to randomly packaged the strings into droplets. Each droplet contains a barcode in the sequence that helped the researchers reassembling the file.
The researchers then "mapped the ones and zeros in each droplet to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C and T," and ended up with a digital list of 72,000 DNA strands that contained the encoded data.

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