> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530084.300-glassedin-dna-makes-the-ultimate-time-capsule.html#.VOI7VULQScM > > <http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530084.300-glassedin-dna-makes-the-ultimate-time-capsule.html#.VOI7VULQScM> > > Glassed-in DNA makes the ultimate time capsule - 15 February 2015 - New > Scientist > > IF YOU must preserve messages for people in the far future to read, Blu-ray > discs and USB sticks are no good. For real long-term storage, you want a DNA > time capsule. > > Just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of holding 455 exabytes – enough > for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, > with room to spare. It's also incredibly durable: DNA has been extracted and > sequenced from 700,000-year-old horse bones > </article/mg21829234.700-oldest-animal-genome-is-sequenced-from-horse-bone.html>. > But conditions have to be right for it to last. > > "We know that if you just store it lying around, you lose information," says > Robert Grass <http://www.fml.ethz.ch/the-lab/people/lecturer.html> of the > Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. So he and colleagues are > working on ways to increase DNA's longevity, with the aim of storing data for > thousands or millions of years. > > They began by looking at the way information is encoded on a DNA strand. The > simplest method treats the DNA bases A and C as a "0" and G and T as a "1". > Of course, any damage to the DNA leaves holes in the data, so the team used > an error-correcting technique called a Reed-Solomon code. This includes > redundant blocks that can be used to reconstruct garbled bits of data. > > They also tried to mimic the way fossils keep a DNA sequence intact. > Excluding all water from the environment was key, so they encapsulated the > DNA in microscopic spheres of glass. > > To test how long this storage system might last, they encoded two venerable > documents, totalling 83 kilobytes: the Swiss federal charter from 1291, and > the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 10th-century version of ancient Greek texts. DNA > versions of these texts were kept at 60, 65 and 70 °C for a week to simulate > ageing. They remained readable without any errors (Angewandte Chemie, > doi.org/f23gmf <http://dx.doi.org/f23gmf>). > > The results suggest that data in DNA form could last 2000 years if kept at a > temperature of around 10 °C. The Global Seed Vault > </article/mg19726472.500-commentary-work-together-save-the-planet.html> in > the Arctic could preserve it for over 2 million years at a chilly -18 °C, > offering truly long-term storage. > > Grass would like to store all the world's current knowledge for future > generations, but it's far too expensive to generate DNA at present. It cost > around £1000 to encode the 83 kilobytes, so doing the same with Wikipedia > would run to billions. Instead, Grass suggests that we focus on what future > historians might want to read. "If you look at how we look at the Middle > Ages, it's very influenced by what information has been stored," he says. > "It's very important that we get a relatively neutral documentation of our > current time and store that." > > Sriram Kosuri <http://www.chemistry.ucla.edu/directory/kosuri-sriram> of the > University of California, Los Angeles, thinks the projected preservation > times are reasonable. In 2012 he stored a copy of a colleague's book in DNA > </article/dn22190-books-and-javascript-stored-in-dna-molecules.html> and is > now working with the band OK Go to create a DNA version of their latest album > <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/petri-dish-pop>. But he's less > sure about what to put in a time capsule. "I haven't given it much thought," > he says. "We pretty much chose an arbitrary piece of digital information > whose only constraint is that we weren't going to get in trouble for making a > lot of copies of it." > > This article appeared in print under the headline "DNA in glass – the > ultimate archive" > > If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or > online, please contact the syndication > </contact/syndication?titleOrURL=http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530084.300> > department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to > photos, but there are a variety of licensing options </info/in216?full=true> > available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
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