DNA storage: The code that could save civilisation

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IN DEPTH| 24 July 2013
DNA storage: The code that could save civilisation

Ed Yong

(Copyright: Thinkstock)

Two scientists think we can safeguard the world's knowledge against an apocalypse if we store it in DNA. How far-fetched is the idea? Ed Yong meets them to find out.

(Copyright: Science Photo Library)

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data.

Neither Ewan Birney nor Nick Goldman can remember exactly how they came up with the idea of storing all the world’s knowledge in DNA. They know it happened in the bar of the Gastwerk Hotel in Hamburg, and that many beers were involved. They may or may not have scrawled their ideas on a napkin. “It must have involved a pen or pencil because I can’t think without holding one,” says Goldman. “It would’ve involved a lot of hands from me,” says Birney.

Their chat was fuelled by a simple realisation: scientists would soon start amassing more genetic information than they could afford to store. In the 1990s, this problem would have seemed laughable. Back then, it took a decade to sequence the human genome and geneticists could store their data on an Excel spreadsheet. Since then, the relentless improvement in sequencing machines has turned that trickle of genomic data into a full-on flood. This technology doubles in efficiency every six months, allowing you to sequence twice as much DNA for the same amount of money. However, it takes 18 months to get twice as much hard disk for your buck, so it is starting to cost more to store the results of experiments than to actually run them in the first place. “And at some point, not too far in the future, you would run out of either disk space or money,” says Goldman.

That would be a setback for a normal lab and an outright catastrophe for the place where Birney and Goldman work. Located in an isolated campus on the outskirts of Cambridge, UK, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) stores genomic data from labs all over the world. At an internal conference in Hamburg, in April 2010, “you couldn’t move for someone saying the EBI will have to close down the DNA archive because it’s unsustainable”, says Birney.

After the conference, Goldman and Birney retreated to a local pub and started batting around possible solutions, beers in hand. They realised that the big problem was the cycle of obsolescence that all data-storing technologies go through. Old machines are junked in favour of new hardware (remember VCRs?) and any data stored on out-of-date media must be re-read and re-written onto the medium du jour, all at great expense. “We thought: Isn’t there some other nano-machine that would allow us to store digital data?” says Birney. Both of them start laughing—the answer was so obvious. “We said: Duh! It’s going to be DNA.”

Well, this IS from Not So Great Anymore Britain…

[Dori]

They know it happened in the bar of the Gastwerk Hotel in Hamburg, and that many beers were involved. They may or may not have scrawled their ideas on a napkin.

Ya know.....I think they are the same guys who designed the freeway system in Los Angeles.