Modern processors and microcircuits are based on silicon. Despite the fact that the computing power of processors is growing, it is limited by the capabilities of this material, sooner or later scientists will come close to the point where further growth will be impossible. More promising material for creating microcircuits and processors are DNA molecules, 1 cm3 can store as many molecules as needed to store 10 TB of information.
Scientists from different countries are looking for an opportunity to use the colossal capabilities of the DNA molecule in the interests of man. In 2010, the first success was achieved by the research group of biologist Craig Venter, which managed to encode a watermark in the genes of a synthetic bacterium, the size of which was 7920 bits.
In 2012, this record was broken by Harvard scientists led by George Church - they wrote a whole book of 53,400 words on a DNA molecule, with 11 images and a JavaScript program (total amount of information 5.27 million bits). In order to ensure the safety of the data, the developers used chemically synthesized molecules. Living cells are not suitable for this, since they can remove some fragments on their own.
All information was divided into data blocks of 96 bits, the addresses of the bitstream were 19 characters long. There were 54,898 such blocks in the book, and each was recorded on a separate DNA strand. All blocks were kept physically separate from each other.
The specialists had to create their own digital coding system (some amino acids were counted as zeros, and others as ones), since the existing systems did not fit in one way or another. In modern computers, binary logic is adopted, consisting of two states, and in the DNA molecule there are four bases linked in a chain: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).
Data on a DNA molecule can be stored for a very long time - up to several thousand years. Despite the obvious advantages of DNA molecules, these biological "memory cards" have many disadvantages. The main difficulty lies in being able to decode the stored information and "read" the text. The result of the Harvard group turned out to be great: there were only two errors in the 5.27 megabit file.
