The number of new digital data grows at 2.5 million gigabytes every day, according to MIT, adding to the approximately 10 trillion digital data gigabytes that already exist. All this data: movies, music and more, are stored in huge data centers that are expensive and increasingly massive. This represents a growing problem as the world is increasingly digitized and file demands grow.

The last research has highlighted DNA as a potential way to store large amounts of data without the space and cost requirements that come with the data centers. MIT has based on that work in a newly published study, with researchers who affirm that all the digital data of the world could be stored theoretically in a single cup full of DNA.

This is due to the high DNA density, which allows it to maintain huge amounts of data in relation to its size. Although previously we have seen examples of digital data storage such as text or images such as DNA, this new job focuses on an important aspect of budding technology: recovering the information you want from several DNA pieces storing many files.

According to his new study, MIT researchers have shown this ability using a 6-micrometer silica particle that stores 20 images. Short DNA sequences were used as labels with the content of the file, which allows researchers to successfully pull the individual images they wanted in the DNA stored album.

Although it may sound unusual, DNA offers many benefits when it comes to mass data storage and not only for its high density. According to the researchers, the data stored in this way would be “extremely stable”. The Biological Engineering teacher MIT Mark Bathes explained:

We need new solutions to store these massive amounts of data that the world is accumulating, especially file data. The DNA is a thousand times more dense than even the flash memory, and another property that is interesting is that once you perform the DNA polymer, it does not consume energy. You can write the DNA and then save it forever.