UK scientists have stored the entire human genome in a “5D memory crystal” in the hope that it could be used in the future as a blueprint to bring humanity back from extinction.
The crystal, developed by a team of researchers at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, could also be used to create a registry of endangered plant and animal species.
It can store up to 360 terabytes of information for billions of years and withstand extreme conditions including freezing, fires, direct impacts, cosmic radiation and temperatures of up to 1,000°C, the university said in a press release published Thursday (19).
In 2014, crystal was awarded the Guinness World Record as “the most durable digital storage material.”
Kazansky’s team used ultrafast lasers to inscribe human genome data into cavities as small as 20 nanometers (a nanometer is about one-billionth of a meter).
They describe the data storage in the crystal as 5D because the information is translated into five different dimensions of its nanostructures — its height, length, width, orientation and position.
“The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities for other researchers to create an eternal repository of genomic information, from which complex organisms such as plants and animals could be restored, should future science allow it,” said Peter Kazansky, professor of optoelectronics, who led the team at Southampton.
The team had to consider who — or what — would retrieve the information, so far into the future.
It could be an intelligence (species or machine) — or it could be found so far in the future that no reference for it exists. To help whoever finds it, the researchers included a visual key.
“The visual key inscribed on the crystal gives the discoverer knowledge about what data is stored within it and how it can be used,” Kazansky said.
“Their work is extremely impressive,” said Thomas Heinis, who leads DNA storage research at Imperial College London and was not involved in the study. However, he said there were still questions about how this data could be read in the future.
“What Southampton has is likely to have a longer shelf life, but that begs the question: for what? For future generations? Sure, but how will they know how to read the crystal? How will they know how to build the device to read the crystal? Will the device be available hundreds of years from now?” he added.
“I can barely plug in my 10-year-old iPod and listen to what I listened to back then.”
For now, the crystal is stored in the Memory of Humanity archive, a time capsule inside a salt cave in Austria.
In 2018, Kazansky and his team used memory crystal technology to store Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi trilogy “Foundation,” which was then launched into space aboard a Tesla Roadster. The technology has also been used to store important documents in human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Magna Carta.
Earlier this year, scientists unveiled a plan to protect Earth’s species in a cryogenic biorepository on the Moon, with the aim of saving species in the event of a disaster on our planet.
This content was originally published in Scientists store entire human genome in crystal that could last billions of years on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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