DESIGN & PRODUCTS MEMORY TECHNOLOGIES
DNA doubles as digital storage medium
By Christoph Hammerschmidt
To use everyday objects such as shirt buttons, water
bottles or eyeglasses as data storage: This is to be made
possible by using DNA as a storage medium. A research
team involving ETH Zurich university is about to make this possible.
Living creatures carry their own construction and operating
instructions in the form of DNA. Not so inanimate objects:
Anyone who produces an object with a 3D printer also needs
a construction drawing. Years
later, it is only possible to print
the same object again if the
original digital information is still
available. Usually, the printing
instructions are not stored in the
object itself. Researchers at ETH
Zurich, together with an Israeli
colleague, want to change this.
The team has developed a way
of storing extensive information
in almost any object. “This allows
3D printing instructions to be
integrated into an object so that
they can still be read directly from
the object even after decades
or centuries,” explains Robert
Grass, Professor at the Department
of Chemistry and Applied
A 3D-printed plastic bunny carries its own 100 kilobytes of
building instructions embedded into the 3D printed material
as DNA-containing glass beads.
Biosciences. The information is stored in DNA molecules, just
as it is stored in living organisms.
This is possible thanks to several developments in recent
years. One is Grass’s approach to labelling products with a DNA
“bar code” embedded in tiny glass beads. These nanoparticles
can be used, for example, as tracers in geological investigations
or to label high-quality foods in order to distinguish them from
counterfeits. The barcode is relatively short: Just about 100 bits.
This technology is currently being commercialised by the ETH
spin-off Haelixa.
On the other hand, in recent years
it has been possible to store large
amounts of data in DNA. Grass’ colleague
Yaniv Erlich, an Israeli computer
scientist with whom he now collaborated,
developed a method that
theoretically makes it possible to store
hundreds of terabytes in a single gram
of DNA. As proof of feasibility, Grass
stored an entire music album in DNA a
year ago, equivalent to 15 megabytes
of data.
Grass and Erlich have now combined
these approaches into a new form of
data storage, as reported in the journal
Nature Biotechnology. They call this
storage form “DNA of things” - in the
style of the “Internet of things”, in which
objects are connected to information via the Internet.
As an application example, the scientists used 3D printing
to produce a plastic bunny that carries its own 100 kilobytes
of building instructions. To embed the data into the 3D printed
material, the researchers added DNA-containing glass beads to
the plastic.
As in biology, this technological approach preserves information
over several generations. The scientists showed this
by recovering the printing information from a small part of the
printed figure and printing a new bunny from it. They were able
to repeat this process five times. So they produced a kind of
“great-great grandson” of the bunny. “All other known forms of
storage have a fixed geometry:
a hard disk must look like a hard
disk, a CD like a CD. You can’t
change the shape without losing
information,” says Erlich. “DNA
is currently the only form of data
storage that can also be available
in liquid form. This allows us
to incorporate it into objects of
any form.”
Another application of the
technology is to hide information
in everyday objects, an approach
known as steganography. To
illustrate this, the scientists drew
on a historical example: one of
the few documents that today
bear witness to life in the Warsaw
Ghetto during the WW II is a
secret archive that a Jewish historian and ghetto inhabitant set
up at the time and hid in milk cans from Hitler’s troops. Today,
this archive is part of the world heritage of documents. Grass,
Erlich and their colleagues used the technology to store a 1.4
megabyte short film about this archive on glass beads, which
they poured into an inconspicuous spectacle lens. “With such
glasses, it would be no problem to pass through the security
check at an airport and thus transport information undetected
from one place to another,” says Erlich. In principle, it is possible
to hide the glass beads in all plastic objects that do not
have to be heated too much during
production, such as epoxies, polyester,
polyurethanes and silicones.
This technology could also be used
to label medicines or building materials
such as adhesives or paints, the
scientists suggest. The information on
their quality could be stored directly in
the specific drug or building material,
Grass says. Drug monitoring authorities
would be able to read measurement
results from production quality control
directly from the product. In the case
of buildings, for example, it would be
possible to find out during a renovation
which products were once used by
which manufacturers during construction.
These inconspicuous glasses contain 15 MByte
of stored data, a good example why DNA-bound
data storage is ideally suited for steganography
applications.
At present, however, the method is still expensive. A large
part of this is accounted for by the synthesis of the corresponding
DNA molecules. The larger the number of units of an object,
the lower the cost of the individual unit.
42 News January 2020 @eeNewsEurope www.eenewseurope.com
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