Data Storage in DNA

Human-beings have always been fond of accessing more and more information in minimum possible time and space. Consequently New Generation Computers and High Speed Internet have gained popularity in the recent years. We have been witness to remarkable achievements like the transition from the bulky hard-drives to the flash drives which has made personal data storage efficiently manageable. But when it comes to handling big data, the data of a corporation or of the world as a whole, the present data storage technology comes nowhere near to be able to manage it efficiently. An urgent need for a proper medium for information archival and retrieval purposes arises. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is seen as a potential medium for such purposes, essentially because it is similar to the sequential code of 0’s and 1’s in a computer. This field (DNA Computing) has emerged to become a topic of interest for researchers since the past decade, with major breakthroughs in its course. Seeming to come straight out of science fiction, “a penny-sized device could store the entire information as the whole Internet”. The analyzed data from the researches reveals that just four grams of DNA can store all the information that the world produces in a year. Here, this topic of ‘Data Storage in DNA’ is described starting from the very first research to the most recent one, their techniques, their advantages and their flaws, the need for DNA storage, and how it will ultimately become a paradigm shift in computing.