Scientists Encode The Wizard of Oz on DNA Strands

It's one thing to modify DNA to reflect different genetic traits. It's quite another to use DNA as a data storage device. But that's what scientists at the University of Texas have manged to do. They encoded an Esperanto translation of L. Frank Baum's novel The Wizard of Oz onto DNA. IEEE Spectrum explains why this task is so challenging:

To make a workable DNA data storage standard, you need instead to worry about substitutions, insertions and deletions. The first is similar to a bit flip in which, say, an A nucleotide is substituted in the place where a T nucleotide used to be. (A, C, T and G and not 0 and 1 are the base language of DNA information.) The latter two classes of error represent cases, as the names suggest, where DNA base pairs are inserted or deleted from a strand.
Crucially, however, with DNA there is no reliable, inherent way of knowing that the strand you’re reading off contains any substitution, insertion or deletion errors. There’s no such thing as a countable and quantifiable DNA “memory register.” Every base pair is just another nucleotide in a long sequence. And together they all form just another strand of DNA.

After separating the text into nucleotide sequences, the scientists then had to encode it:

Encoding The Wizard of Oz into DNA, then, involved passing the data through an “outer” coding layer and an “inner” coding layer. (Think of these steps as two separate algorithms in a complex cryptographic standard.)
The outer layer diagonalized the source data so that any given strand of DNA would contain shards of many portions of the message. The inner layer, HEDGES, then translates each bit into an A, C, T or G according to an algorithm that depends both on the zero or one value of that bit plus additional information about its place in the data stream as well as the data bits immediately preceding it.

They then subjected the DNA to stresses. It proved to be remarkably durable, thus evidencing the utility of DNA for data storage.

-via Instapundit | Photo: Drümmkopf


Comments (0)

Login to comment.
Email This Post to a Friend
"Scientists Encode The Wizard of Oz on DNA Strands"

Separate multiple emails with a comma. Limit 5.

 

Success! Your email has been sent!

close window
X

This website uses cookies.

This website uses cookies to improve user experience. By using this website you consent to all cookies in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

I agree
 
Learn More