Dna packed in tough quartz glass – lasts “millions of years”

Human the entire genetic information, i.e. the data of the DNA tape, has been recorded to strong quartz glass. According to researchers, it can last up to millions of years in nature.

The hope is that it could help future generations in some way. For example, it could help humanity, which would be threatened with extinction.

The quartz glass also contains DNA data of other organisms. The crystal could be used to find out the inheritance of plant and animal species if they are threatened with extinction, or have already died out.

5D memory. This is the name they call their piece of glass Optoelectronics researchers at the University of Southampton.

Optoelectronics is a science that studies the conversion of electric current into light.

According to the researchers, data is stored in five dimensions. They are height, length, width and, as optical dimensions, the orientation of the data and its location.

Optoelectronics researcher Peter Kazansky and his group recorded genetics and other data with the help of very fast lasers.

Quartz glass mainly consists of almost completely pure silicon. It can withstand, for example, hard impacts and violent cosmic radiation.

Heredity basically consists of four nucleic acids arranged in a helical form into a dna strand.

They are commonly described by the letters A, C, G and T. There are about three billion of these letters in the sequence of the DNA tape.

The position of each letter on the tape was checked approximately 150 times. Perimä read-throughs were carried out by a bioinformatics company Helixwork Technologies.

Quartz glass can store up to 360 terabytes of data, researchers say.

A common analogy for a terabyte is that only could be stored in one terabyte 400 digital photos every day for a year.

Lasitalenteen could help restore the genome of complex organisms such as plants and animals, says Kazansky.

The code letters were recorded with lasers in pores with a diameter of 20 nanometers. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter.

According to researchers, quartz glass can withstand several different extreme conditions, such as freezing, fires and temperatures of up to a thousand degrees Celsius.

Quartz glass withstands not only the force that strikes it directly, but also the violent cosmic radiation of space, says the University of Southampton press release.

The group it was also necessary to think about who – or what – would retrieve the data sometime in the distant future.

Data could be searched not only by a person of that time, but also by a robot or artificial intelligence of that time.

Quartz glass might be found in such a distant future that its importance would no longer be understood or known.

You might not find any frame of reference for it in the everyday life of the time.

That’s why the researchers added tips to the glass that would help you open it and at the same time understand what it’s about.

“The glass is engraved with a visual key that provides information about what’s inside and how it can be used,” Kazansky said news service according to CNN.

“Great job”commented the biological recording researcher Thomas Heinis According to CNN.

He leads a group that studies DNA recording at Imperial College London. He himself did not participate in this work.

Quartz glass can sometimes raise questions. Future generations can think about what the glass was made for, says Heinis.

And how to build a device that can read the contents of the glass? It can prove tricky.

“I can barely connect the plug to my ten-year-old iPod and use it to listen to the music I listened to in the early 2000s,” Heinis compares.

5d quartz glass opens opportunities for researchers to build an eternal archive of genetic and other information.

For the time being, the glass is stored in an archive named Memory of Mankind. It is located in a salt mine in Hallstatt, Austria.

Using the same technology, documents related to the history of mankind have also been recorded in the past.

These include, for example, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the British Magna Carta from 1215. It is one model for state constitutions.

Southampton researchers were recently involved in a wild scheme. In it, data collected from all species on Earth would be transferred to the cold biobank on the Moon.

The purpose of the lunar biobank would be to gather data from different species of life. It might help if some big disaster happened on Earth.

Correction on Wednesday, September 25 at 8:45 am: Amino acids corrected to nucleic acids.