The storage capacity of amber was showcased in Jurassic Park when a prehistoric mosquito was mined for information, namely the “dino DNA” stored within its last blood meal. Now, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have taken than idea and run with it to create an amber-like polymer that could store anything from genomes to photo and music files.
The frozen skin of dead rhinos recently demonstrated the frosty temperatures required to store DNA, housed at San Diego’s “Frozen Zoo”. Keeping things so cold requires a lot of energy and constant access to power, something that isn’t possible in some parts of the world, which got scientists wondering about a less demanding alternative.
Enter MIT, where scientists have shown how a new amber-like polymer can be used to store DNA and digital memory at room temperature, all while keeping its contents safe from fluctuations in heat or humidity.
“Freezing DNA is the number one way to preserve it, but it’s very expensive, and it’s not scalable,” said James Banal, a former MIT postdoc, in a statement. “I think our new preservation method is going to be a technology that may drive the future of storing digital information on DNA.”
Most of us think of DNA as that stringy thing that tells cells what to do, but it’s also a remarkably stable way of storing massive amounts of information, biological or digital. In the same way that the binary system can encode information in a series of 0s and 1s, DNA can store information using the chemical bases Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G), and Thymine (T) that make up our DNA.
The approach has been dubbed the T-REX (Thermoset-REinforced Xeropreservation) method, and it builds on previous attempts to encode other materials in speeding up the embedding time, taking just a few hours versus the few days that were required when they tried it with silica.
As a hat-tip to John Hammond and his covetable amber fossil cane, the team were able to use the T-REX method to encode the theme music to Jurassic Park, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the MIT logo, and remove it without any errors. The hardy approach can tolerate up to 75°C (167°F) and isn’t damaged by water, so now the team are going to try and make the polymer into capsules that act as long-term storage devices.
It would apparently only take a coffee mug’s worth of DNA to store all of the world’s data, so a polymer capsule the size of the amber lump atop Hammond’s staff could pack in more information than you might think.
“The idea is, why don’t we preserve the master record of life forever?” concluded Banal. “Ten years or 20 years from now, when technology has advanced way more than we could ever imagine today, we could learn more and more things. We’re still in the very infancy of understanding the genome and how it relates to disease.”
The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
