Tsinghua University issued a document saying that recently, Professor Xiong Zhuo’s team from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Tsinghua University proposed a new DNA data storage system based on engineered living storage microspheres, providing a new solution for large-scale data storage. According to reports,This kind of living storage microsphere carries colorful fluorescent labels and is vividly called "bacterial colorful bead hard drive".
Traditional DNA storage methods face challenges such as low data retrieval efficiency, high storage costs, and insufficient data stability. The bacterial colored bead hard drive uses fluorescence produced by bacteria as a marker to achieve rapid retrieval and classification of data, with a theoretical retrieval speed of up to 196.72MB/s.
The system is expected to store approximately 260,700 petabytes of information, or 260 million terabytes, in the volume of an ordinary home refrigerator (1.5 cubic meters).
As of public data in November 2022, the number of Baidu Netdisk users has reached 800 million, and the total amount of data stored exceeds 100 billion GB, which is about 100 million TB. This means that the Bacteria Caizhu hard drive, which is less than half the size of a refrigerator, can store all the data on Baidu Netdisk.
This research breaks through the technical bottleneck of existing DNA storage and is expected to promote the application of DNA storage technology and provide efficient, stable and sustainable solutions for large-scale data storage in the future.Relevant research results were published in Advanced Materials.
Data show that DNA storage technology is an innovative data storage method that uses synthetic deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as a medium to store information.
DNA storage technology is based on the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, using its four bases (A, T, C, G) to encode information. Each base can represent a binary bit (bit), for example, A and C can represent 0, G and T can represent 1, or other encoding schemes can be used. Through specific algorithms, digital information can be converted into DNA sequences.