The Codes of Modern Life

The Codes of Modern Life
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The glass beads were the best option, however. Water, when unimpeded, destroys DNA. If there are too many breaks and errors in the sequences, no error-correction system can help. The beads, however, protected the DNA from the damaging effects of humidity.
With their layers of error-correction and protective coats in place, Grass and his colleagues then exposed the glass beads to three heat treatments—140˚, 149˚, and 158˚ F—for up to a month “to simulate what would happen if you store it for a long time,” he says. Indeed, after unwrapping their DNA from the beads using a fluoride solution and then re-reading the sequences, they found that slight errors had been introduced similar to those which appear with batetry such as Tektronix Y350C Battery, Tektronix Y400 Battery, Rohde Schwarz FSH626 Battery, Rohde Schwarz FSH-Z32 Battery, Rohde Schwarz FSH6 Battery, Rohde Schwarz FSH18 Battery, Rohde Schwarz FSH3 Battery, Biocare ECG-9803G Battery, Biocare HYLB-114A Battery, Aspect 185-0152 Battery, Aspect 186-0208 Battery, Aspect VTI 14564 Batteryover long timescales in nature. But, at such low levels, the Reed-Solomon codes healed the wounds.
Using the rate at which errors arose, the researchers were able to extrapolate how long the data could remain intact at lower temperatures. If kept in the clement European air outside their laboratory in Zurich, for example, they estimate a ballpark figure of around 2,000 years. But place these glass beads in the dark at –0.4˚ F, the conditions of the Svalbard Global Seed Bank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, and you could save your photos, music, and eBooks for two million. That’s roughly ten times as long as our species has been on Earth.
Using heat treatments to mimic the effects of age isn’t foolproof, Grass admits; a month at 159˚ F certainly isn’t the same as millennia in the freezer. But his conclusions aren’t unsupported. In recent years, palaeogenetic research into long-dead animals has revealed that DNA can persist long after death. And when conditions are just right—cold, dark, and dry—these molecular strands can endure long after the extinction of an entire species. In 2012, for instance, the genome of an extinct human relative that died around 80,000 years ago was reconstructed from a finger bone. A year later, that record was shattered when scientists sequenced the genome of an extinct horse that died in Canadian permafrost around 700,000 years ago. “We already have long-term data,” Grass says. “Real long-term data.”
But despite its inherent advantages, there are still some major hurdles to surmount before DNA becomes a viable storage option. For one, synthesis and sequencing is still too costly. “We’re still on the order of a million-fold too expensive on both fronts,” Kosuri says. Plus, it’s still slow to read and write, and it’s not rewritable nor is it random access. Currently, today’s DNA data storage techniques are similar to magnetic tape—the whole memory has to be read to retrieve a piece of information.
Such caveats limit DNA to archival data storage, at least for the time being. “The question is if it’s going to drop fast enough and low enough to really compete in terms of dollars per gigabyte,” Grass says. It’s likely that DNA will continue to be of interest to medical and biological laboratories, which will help to speed up synthesis and sequencing and drive down prices.
Whatever new technologies are on the horizon, history has taught us that Reed-Solomon-based coding will probably still be there, behind the scenes, safeguarding our data against errors. Like the genes within an organism, the codes have been passed down to subsequent generations, slightly adjusted and optimized for their new environment. They have a proven track record that starts on Earth and extends ever further into the Milky Way. “There cannot be a code that can correct more errors than Reed-Solomon codes…It’s mathematical proof,” Bossert says. “It’s beautiful.”