Encoding data on DNA has been done, as it has on other long-chain polymers with long life, and the data desnity is emormous: ~1018 bytes/mm3, according to the university.
But making and reading a polymer is elaborate science with elaborate equipment, and slow.
Harvard’s answer is to use an ink-jet printer to deposit seven different coloured inks on a surface, and then read them with an optical microscope equipped with a spectrometer – still high-tech, but not as high-tech as making custom DNA.
The inks are fluorescent dyes, and chosen for thie stability and to stay in place by chemically bonding to the epoxy substrate.
“Theoretically, the data can be saved for a very long time – thousands of years or more, superior to that of current media devices for data storage,” according to Harvard. And it needs only “existing commercial technologies, and uses no energy once the data is recorded.”
It could be particularly helpful, continued the university, with information whose storage is regulated – financial and legal records, for example – as it is not hackable over the Internet and can’t be read without a local microscope.
The researchers report that 1.4Mbyte was stored on a 7.2 x 7.2mm area using ASCII encoding, and the information can be read with 99.6% accuracy.
Write averages at 128bit/ and read at 469bit/s – believed by the team to be the fastest reported read speed of any molecular information storage method.
As a demonstration, a paper by Michael Faraday and a .jpg of his image were stored.
“This method could provide access to archival data storage at a low cost,” said Harvard researcher Amit Nagarkar (pictured) – the estimate is under $0.0001 per Gbyte.
The university has licensed the technology to a company founded by Nagarkar and other scientists on the project.
The work is published as ‘Storing and Reading Information in Mixtures of Fluorescent Molecules‘, by the Americal Chemical Society. The full paper can be read without payment, and the supplementary information includes the price estimate method in section S19.
Funding came from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.