An entire ‘Wizard of Oz’ novel has been stored on DNA. Yes, DNA. Here’s how and why
.JPG "With Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Judy Garland as Dorothy, and Jack Haley as the Tin Woodman, the stars of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ sing together in this scene from the 1939 MGM classic film.")
Scientists have been experimenting with storing information on strands of DNA for years. It’s a technical process that is 5 million times more efficient than current storage methods, according to researchers.
Now, an interdisciplinary team developed a new algorithm to do it “with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency,” a news release from the University of Texas at Austin said.
And their first order of business? Encode the entire “The Wizard of Oz” on intertwined DNA strands translated into Esperanto — an international language with consistent grammar rules created to make communication between people from different countries easier.
The technique is published in a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We need a way to store this data so that it is available when and where it’s needed in a format that will be readable,” Stephen Jones, a postdoctoral fellow at UT who collaborated on the project, said in the news release. “This idea takes advantage of what biology has been doing for billions of years: storing lots of information in a very small space that lasts a long time.”
Unlike storage bins, DNA does not take up much space, and it can sit in room temperature for hundreds of thousands of years, Jones said.
“One milliliter droplet of DNA could store the same amount of information as two Walmarts full of data servers,” the researchers said, making the genetic material both durable and compact.
Current techniques to store information on DNA require the data to be repeated 10 to 15 times so that errors such as insertions or deletions could be easily detected, the release said.
That’s why the team developed an algorithm that can encode information in a more accurate way even when the DNA strands are damaged.
“We found a way to build the information more like a lattice,” Jones said. “Each piece of information reinforces other pieces of information. That way, it only needs to be read once.”
Can we depend on DNA storage?
To test its durability, the team put its “The Wizard of Oz” sample under high temperatures and humidity, according to the release. The conditions damaged the DNA strands, but “all the information was still decoded successfully.”
But DNA in general is prone to errors during the replication process, the researchers said. When something is accidentally added or deleted, the whole sequence shifts without any sign that a mistake occurred, unlike computer codes “that tend to show up as blank spots.”
For that reason, the researchers translated the novel into Esperanto, according to the release. The language, together with the algorithm, knows to skip areas of the DNA that are difficult to read or full of errors.
“A dropped word in a novel is not as big a deal as a dropped zero in a tax return,” the release said.
“We tried to tackle as many problems with the process as we could at the same time,” John Hawkins, a UT alumnus and postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, said in the release. “What we ended up with is pretty remarkable.”
One organization plans to begin a “Lunar Library” this year by sending information about humanity stored on DNA to the moon, Scientific American reported.
“When you look at the history of civilizations on Earth, it turns out most of them don’t make it, statistically,” said Nova Spivack, co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation behind the Lunar Library.
“There could be a solar flare, some kind of impact from an object we didn’t know was there. With all of these threats it seems prudent to develop an insurance policy for backing up our data.”
This story was originally published July 16, 2020 at 6:31 PM.
