SANDIA BIOENGINEERS Marlene and George Bachand show off their new method for encrypting and storing sensitive information in DNA. Digital data storage degrades and can become obsolete and old-school books and paper require lots of space. (Photo by Lonnie Anderson)
Experiments at CERN’s LHC generate 15 million Gb of data per year. That is a lot of digital data to inscribe on hard drives or beam up to the “cloud.” George Bachand, a Sandia National Laboratories bioengineer is exploring a better, more permanent method for encrypting and storing sensitive data: DNA. Compared to digital and analog information storage, DNA is more compact and durable and never becomes obsolete. Tape- and disk-based data storage degrades and can become obsolete, requiring rewriting every decade or so. Cloud- or server-based storage requires a vast amount of electricity; in 2011 Google’s server farms used enough electricity to power 200,000 U.S. homes. Furthermore, old-school methods require lots and lots of space. IBM estimated 1,000 gigabytes of information in book form would take up 7 miles of bookshelves. In fact, Sandia recently completed a 15,000-square-foot building to store 35,000 boxes of inactive records and archival documents.
Bachand was inspired by the recording of all of Shakespeare’s sonnets into 2.5 million base pairs of DNA—about half the genome of the tiny E. coli bacterium. Using this method, the group at the European Bioinformatics Institute could theoretically store 2.2 petabytes of information—200 times the printed material in the Library of Congress—in 1gm DNA.
Using a practically unbreakable encryption key, the team has encoded an abridged version of a historical letter written by President Harry Truman into DNA. They then made the DNA, spotted it onto Sandia letterhead and mailed it—along with a conventional letter—around the country. After the letter’s cross-country trip, the Bachands were able to extract the DNA out of the paper, amplify and sequence the DNA, and decode the message in about 24 hours at a cost of about $45.
The Bachands’ method of encrypting a message into DNA. Using a computer algorithm they can encrypt a message into a sequence of DNA. Then they chemically synthesize the DNA. The DNA can be read by DNA sequencing, and then translated and decoded using the same computer algorithm. Credit: Sandia National Laboratories
To achieve this proof-of-principle, the first step was to develop the software to generate the encryption key and encrypt text into a DNA sequence. Using a 3-base code, ie how living organisms store their information, 64 distinct characters—letters, spaces and punctuation—can be encoded, with room for redundancy. Eg, spaces make up on average 15 to 20%of the characters in a text document, an encryption key could specify that TAG, TAA and TGA each code for “space” while GAA and CTC could code for “E.” This would reduce the amount of repetition and make brute-force hacking more difficult.
The team’s first test was to encode a 180-character message, about the size of a tweet. Encoding the message into 550 bases was easy; actually making the DNA was hard. “Our initial approach was very expensive, very time consuming and didn’t work,” said George Bachand. However, “there’s a new technology that’s come out and made the ability to take synthetic DNA, what are called gene blocks, and stitch them together into these artificial chromosomes. These changes have just happened within the last few years, which has made it pretty extraordinary. Now it is possible to readily make these gene blocks right on the bench top and it can be done in large, production-scale pretty quickly.”
APPS: Storing historical classified documents and barcoding/watermarking electromechanical components, such as computer chips made in the Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications complex, Sandia’s Department of Defense-certified fabrication facility, prior to storage.
George Bachand imagines encoding each component’s history—when it was manufactured, the lot number, starting material, even the results of reliability tests—into DNA and spotting it onto the actual chip. Instead of having to find the serial number and look up that metadata in a digital or paper-based database, future engineers could swab the chip itself, sequence the DNA and get that information in a practically tamper-proof manner. To test the feasibility, Marlene Bachand spotted lab equipment with a test message, and was able recover and decode the message, even after months of daily use and routine cleaning. DNA spotted onto electronic components and stored in cool, dark environments could be recoverable for hundreds of years.
Another, more straightforward application for the Bachands’ DNA storage method would be for historical or rarely accessed classified documents. But conversion of paper documents into DNA requires the “cumbersome” process of scanning, encrypting, then synthesizing the DNA, admitted George Bachand. Making the DNA is the most expensive part of the process, but the cost has decreased substantially over the past few years and should continue to drop.
“I hope this project progresses and expands the biological scope and nature of projects here at Sandia. I believe the field of biomimicry has no boundaries. Given all of the issues with broken encryption and data breaches, this technology could potentially provide a path to address these timely and ever-increasing security problems,” said Marlene Bachand.
http://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/labnews/articles/2016/08-07/dna.html
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