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Scientists have been working on using proteins, bacteria and other organic material as storage media for a while, and if it looks like all those efforts are bearing fruits only now, it doesn’t make it any more unlikely! Calling it ‘bioencryption by recombination’, a team of scientists from Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have figured out how to store and en/decrypt data onto living bacteria cells.
According to CUHK’s mission statement: CUHK iGEM 2010 team is formed by a group of undergraduates and instructors from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Our project is to create a brand new biological cryptography system. We harness the incredible adaptability of simple organisms in the tortured environment to make sure that the message stored can be left undisturbed regardless of any environment changes.
The aim of the project is also to make it extremely resistant to hacking and environmental damage, which most current solutions are affected by. In essence, the team sought to make bacteria data storage and encryption feasible in the real world, which previously returned very low and impractical data density figures. Now, they’ve squeezed more than 9, 31,322 GB of data onto 1 gram of E.Coli bacteria by creating a massively parallel bacterial data storage system. Compared to 1 to 4 GB per gram data density of conventional media, 9, 00,000 GB per gram is truly astounding.
Taking the dream one step closer to industrial reality, the team has developed data proof-read/correction and random access modules, in addition to an encryption module, all using site-specific recombination of the inversion type. In essence, the team has transferred information onto DNA, and the encoding method to do this used DNA bases, taking adenosine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine to represent numbers 0 to 3.