This is how researchers use DNA strands to store 'OK Go' music video – Watch!

Image credit: Tara Brown photography/University of Washington

New Delhi: Ever wished or imagined how you could store your artwork, family videos in DNA strands that can maintain its integrity for hundreds or even thousands of years? Seems like that's exactly what a team of researchers has done. Raising the bar for DNA storage systems, researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have stored a record 200 megabytes of data on the molecular strands.

While storing data is not new, the current feat of 200 MB is a huge leap from the most recent DNA storage record of just 22 MB, as per Mashable.

The team of researchers successfully stored digital versions of works of art including a high-definition video by the band OK Go, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, the top 100 books of Project Guttenberg and the nonprofit Crop Trust’s seed database on DNA strands.

Video courtesy: Microsoft Research/YouTube

“Demand for data storage is growing exponentially, and the capacity of existing storage media is not keeping pace. That’s making it hard for organizations that need to store a lot of data - such as hospitals with vast databases of patient data or companies with lots of video footage - to keep up. And it means information is being lost, and the problem will only worsen without a new solution”, Microsoft writes in a blog.

Meanwhile, you can also enjoy that awesome 'OK Go' music video here!

DNA is being seen as the answer and has several advantages as a storage medium.

“As long as there is DNA-based life on the planet, we’ll be interested in reading it,” said Karin Strauss, the principal Microsoft researcher on the project. “So it’s eternally relevant.

The researchers, however, acknowledge they have a long way to go.

“The biotechnology industry made big advances in both “synthesizing” (encoding) and “sequencing” (decoding) data in recent years. Even so, he said, the team still has a long way to go to make it viable as an archival technology,” said Luis Henrique Ceze, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and the university’s principal researcher on the project.

Although the DNA storage method remains expensive and slow compared to current method, the technology could one day become a viable alternative for conventional hard drives, optical disks, etc.