"From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes (1 exabytes = 1 billion gigabytes) of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days and the pace is accelerating."

   

      Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google, August 4, 2010.


 


Looking at the above statement (estimate) one can imagine the need of storage device to store big data of Cloud in near future. Do we have sufficient resources or sufficient money to build such storage devices? What is the ultimate drive to store big data in ecnomical way? If your great grandchildren wants to know about your family and life, where to store such data? Can we store our pictures (available on facebook) or vidoes available on youtube for 10,000 years? All this seems to be possible with advancement of new technology known as synthetic DNA storage. For a quick glance watch the video below.

Nature is already storing the entire blueprint of life in the DNA of every cell. Motivated by this, in 2012, Church et al successfully stored the book Regenesis in DNA, but file was retrieved with some errors. This issue was solved by Goldman et al (2013) when they stored five different file formats in DNA and retrieved all the original data from DNA with 100 percent of accuracy at European Bioinformatics Institute in his work Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA. Inspired from this work, we have been able to develop a software called 'DNA Cloud' that can convert the data file to DNA and vice versa. You can send the output to any biotech company and they will send you the synthetic DNA that you can store in your referigerator.

DNA Cloud 1.0
The software 'DNA Cloud' will encode the data file in any format (.text, .pdf, .png, .mkv, .mp3 etc.) to DNA and also decode it back to retrieve original file. Enjoy the software by storing your facebook data or your video in synthetic DNA.

DNA Cloud 2.0
The next version of software "DNA Cloud 2.0" enables user to encode data in DNA using an efficient encoding technique by using the non-linear family of codes. DNA Golay Codes of different lengths can be used for encoding, according to requirement of error correction t and better code rate.

DNA Cloud 3.14
DNA cloud 3.14 is an even updated version which is more efficient than v2.0. The user has the option to use two different algorithams i.e. Goldman and Golay to encode/decode any type of file. This version also includes the number of chunks of actual DNA required to store the given data. This info will be available in the .dnac file generated while encoding.

DNA Cloud has been developed for the sole-purpose of generating a user-friendly, interactive environment for users to envisage their DNA data storage.


Related Papers
Poster Paper
Shalin Shah, Dixita Limbachiya, and Manish K. Gupta, DNA Cloud: A Potential Tool for Storing Big Data on DNA, 11th Annual Conference on Foundations of Nanoscience: Self-Assembled Architectures and Devices 2014 (FNANO14). Paper (pdf) Poster (pdf)
Preprint
Vijay Dhameliya, Dixita Limbachiya, Madhav Khakhar and Manish K. Gupta, On Optimal Family of Codes for DNA Storage. Paper (pdf)