There is a major reason why some of the technology companies have to have ever increasing data centres. This is because people are insistent on keeping photographs of the family, emails and videos that they find amusing. There are plans in place to reduce the amount of space needed to store this data; and if it is successful, there will now be the size of a cube of sugar needed rather than the Walmart superstore-sized space that is being used.
The computer scientists working on this project have details of a system that can store, encode and later retrieve large amounts of digital data. They manage this by using molecules of DNA. There will be millions of times more data stored than it is possible to store in the archives that are currently available.
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Experiments were explained in a paper, and this showed how the team was able to encode the data from four images to DNA snippets. They were also able to do the reverse of this and reconstruct the initial images completely.
A DNA database system is being researched, and it could be the answer to storage problems. Microsoft and the University of Washington researchers can randomly access DNA from a large range of molecules and can retrieve them in sequences. At present, the main block to this work is the cost, and there is no problem with technology. It is Microsoft, the David Notkin Endowed Graduate Fellowship and the National Science Foundation that are paying for the work.
Source: University of Washington
