DNA Palette

2024: Product Announcement

Tianjin University's Center for Advanced Scientific Research in Synthetic Biology, in collaboration with Huanghu Hospital, has made a significant breakthrough in DNA-based data storage. At the end of September 2024, Chinese researchers presented an innovative DNA Palette coding scheme.

Proposed method allows encoding data of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain in DNA, as well as decoding information without loss and performing three-dimensional reconstruction of images. The technology is said to pave the way for the development of advanced medical information storage systems.

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MRI brain scans are an important tool for clinical diagnosis, surgical planning, and treatment evaluation. However, the vast amounts of data generated during such procedures pose significant long-term storage challenges. This problem is especially important for diseases such as Parkinson's disease, epilepsy and neurogenetic disorders, since in such cases the accumulation and analysis of data throughout the patient's life are of great importance. The media existing for 2024 can hardly cope with the long-term storage of such large amounts of information.

At the same time, DNA, known for its exceptional stability and storage density, is a promising way to accumulate information. The Tianjin University research team successfully encoded 11.28 MB of brain MRI data into about 250,000 DNA sequences, reaching an impressive density of 2.39 bits per base. The encoded oligonucleotides, which are individual strands of synthetic DNA, are stored as dry powder, weigh only 3 micrograms, and support more than 300 reading operations.^[1]

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