Scientists have stored the entire human genome on a five-dimensional crystal that’s capable of digitally storing up to 360 terabytes of information and is built to survive for billions of years. The tech could be used to create an enduring record of human, animal, and plant genomes.
Some might remember the ‘Pioneer plaques,’ a pair of gold-colored metal plaques carried aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft that launched in the early 1970s. The brainchild of American astronomer Carl Sagan, the plaques were etched with a visual message – including a naked man and woman and a schematic of our Solar System – in case one of the craft bumped into intelligent extraterrestrial life on its travels.
Now, researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have created a 21st-century version of the Pioneer plaques using a 5D memory crystal that stores vast amounts of information for billions of years without degrading. They’ve stored the complete human genome – about three billion Gs, As, Ts and Cs – on it.
“We know from the work of others that genetic material of simple organisms can be synthesized and used in an existing cell to create a viable living specimen in a lab,” said Professor Peter Kazansky, who led the team of the University’s scientists. “The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities for other researchers to build an everlasting repository of genomic information from which complex organisms like plants and animals might be restored should science in the future allow.”
The crystal was developed by the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Center (ORC) using nanostructured glass. It’s sometimes called the ‘Superman crystal,’ a nod to the 1978 Superman movie in which a memory crystal held an AI version of Jor-El, the superhero’s biological father. In 2016, New Atlas reported on the crystal being used to save digital copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among other important documents from human history.
Ultra-fast (femtosecond) lasers are used to precisely inscribe data into self-assembled nanostructured voids oriented within silica. But, unlike 2D surfaces like paper or magnetic tape, this encoding method uses two optical dimensions and three spatial coordinates to write throughout the material, achieving encoding in five dimensions. The 5D crystal can hold up to 360 terabytes (TB) of information for billions of years, remaining stable even under freezing conditions and temperatures of up to 1,000 °C (1,832 °F).
To test the crystal’s potential to be used as a repository for important genetic information, the researchers inscribed the full human genome into it. Each of the approximately three billion letters that comprise the genome was sequenced 150 times to ensure it was in the correct position.
The crystal was also inscribed with a key to ensure that whatever intelligence discovers it in the future – human, machine, or alien – will know how to use the information it contains. The key shows the universal elements (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen), the four bases of the DNA molecule (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine) with their molecular structure, where they’re placed in the DNA double helix, and how genes are arranged on a chromosome.
“The visual key inscribed on the crystal gives the finder knowledge of what data is stored inside and how it could be used,” Kazansky said.
The genome-containing crystal is currently being kept safe. It’s in a time capsule in an ancient Austrian salt cave, overseen by the Memory of Mankind archive.
We don’t yet have the technology to synthetically create humans from their DNA building blocks, but with the advances currently being made, who knows what the future holds?
Source: University of Southampton
