Digital information storage in DNA
Dr. Paul Bertone,
European Bioinformatics Institute, UK –
Abstract:
The amount of information that humans produce and want to store is increasing exponentially. It is estimated that the total digital information on Earth is of the order of zettabytes (thousands of billions of billions of bytes). The amount of digital information that people want to archive, i.e. store safely, recoverably, for long periods of time with only rare access and with minimal ongoing maintenance requirements, is also growing. However, at present essentially no long-term archiving of digital information is taking place. This is because all current digital storage media require a continual cycle of maintenance to renew both the storage medium and the ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ hardware. This in turn is because there is no conventional computing storage technology that is trusted to survive more than a few years.
Recent genome science-inspired advances in the technologies for reading and writing DNA led us to investigate possibility of using DNA as a digital archive medium. DNA is a stable information carrier, with 10,000-year-old intact sequences routinely recovered from historical samples. Safe DNA storage conditions are easily maintained at low cost, and the ability to read DNA fragments will surely survive for as long as there are technologically-advanced humans inquisitive about the working of living systems. In our proof-of-concept experiment, we showed how existing DNA technologies can be used to store and recover digital information in a manner that could be extrapolated to global data scales, incorporating modern methods such as error correcting codes for data integrity. This talk will describe this experiment, and will speculate on the future of DNA as a digital storage medium.
This talk is a keynote address in the scope of the conferences iPRES-2013/DC-2013 The conferences require registration but this talk will be open to free audience.
Bio
PhD Yale University, 2005. At EMBL-EBI since 2005. Joint appointments in Genome Biology and Developmental Biology Units. Associate Investigator, Wellcome Trust – Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge
Host
José Luis Brinquete Borbinha
Venue:
Congress Center
Upcoming Events
Workshop “Metabolism and mathematical models: Two for a tango” – 2nd Edition
Title: Workshop Metabolism and mathematical models: Two for a tango – 2nd Edition
Dates: October 25-26, 2022
Location: This workshop will be held in a virtual way
The topic of this workshop is metabolism in general, with a special focus, although not exclusive, on parasitology. Besides an exploration of the biological, biochemical and biomedical aspects, the workshop will also aim at presenting some of the mathematical modelling, algorithmic theory and software development that have become crucial to explore such aspects.
This workshop is being organised in the context of two projects, both with the Inria European Team Erable. One of the projects involves a partnership with the University of São Paulo (USP), in São Paulo, Brazil, more specifically the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) and the Institute of Biomedical Sciences – Inria Associated Team Capoeira – and the other involves the Inesc-ID/IST in Portugal, ETH in Zürich and EMBL in Heidelberg – H2020 Twinning Project Olissipo.
The workshop is open to all members of these two projects but also, importantly, to the community in general.
The program and more details are available here.