Mumbai: A worldwide technology leader in the media and entertainment sector Technicolor recently managed to encode million copies of an old movie into a few droplets of water, utilising “artificial, non-biological” DNA.
According to an AFP report, on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, a Technicolor scientist surrounded by the latest virtual reality technology inspects a vial containing a few droplets of water—and one million copies of an old movie encoded into DNA.
While the process has been described by the firm’s chief Frederic Rose as the future of movie archiving, the technology certainly has the potential to drastically increase storage space on computing devices, especially smartphones.
The report also pointed out that scientists have been experimenting with DNA as a potential medium of storage for years but the availability of modern day lab equipment has finally turned projects like the one mentioned above into reality.
The project is primarily based on research conducted by scientists at Harvard University who managed to store around 700 terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA.
Well, these are clear indications that artificial DNA can not only be the future of movie archiving but also an apt replacement of storage hardware on modern computing devices.
Imagine the capacity of storage one can achieve on a smartphone equipped with artificial DNA storage. Currently, the highest capacity of storage on a smartphone is hardly 128GB and on laptops it may reach 2TB.
If this revolutionary mechanism is incorporated for commercial device storage purposes, you might witness smartphones and other computing devices with capacities of well over 100TB in future.
You must be wondering why companies have not thought about this method before. Well, unfortunately they have, but the process requires numerous expensive lab-dish equipment for converting the large amount of computer coded data into molecules.
Another problem is retracting the DNA back to computer coded data. The contents are read by sequencing the DNA—just like the process used in genetic fingerprinting—and turning it back into computer code.
However, if scientists figure out a way to integrate Artificial DNA data storage in modern day devices, it will not only revolutionise the way people store data but also eliminate any kind of space constraints that users have to deal with on a daily basis.
Check out this video for more details on DNA data storage:
