Researchers 'Upgrade' DNA Alphabet Beyond A, C, G, T to Expand Data Storage

"Every day, several petabytes of data are generated on the internet," says Kasra Tabatabaei, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "Only one gram of DNA would be sufficient to store that data." So the Institute is now announcing the results of a project Tabatabaei worked on "to transform the double helix into a robust, sustainable data storage platform." CNET reports:Tabatabaei is the co-author of a new study, published in last month's edition of the journal Nano Letters... Essentially, the study team is the first to artificially extend the DNA alphabet, which could allow for massive storage capacities and accommodate a pretty extreme level of digital data.... DNA encodes genetic information with four molecules called nucleotides. There's adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, or A, G, C and T. In a sense, DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and different letter combinations represent different bits of data.... But what if we had a longer alphabet? Presumably, that'd give us a much deeper capacity. Following this line of thought, the team behind the new study artificially added seven new letters to the DNA repertoire.... "Instead of converting zeroes and ones to A, G, C and T, we can convert zeroes and ones to A, G, C, T and the seven new letters in the storage alphabet." One of the study's co-principal investigators said their work "provides an exciting proof-of-principle demonstration of extending macromolecular data storage to non-natural chemistries, which hold the potential to drastically increase storage density in non-traditional storage media."

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