科技資訊:未來的數據存儲介質DNA

In the latest effort to contend with exploding quantities of digital data, researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building block of life, and then accurately read back the text.

研究人員將一整本書通過編碼寫入生命基本單元──DNA遺傳分子中，然後再準確無誤地從中讀出這本書的文本。這是人類爲應對迅猛增長的電子數據所採取的最新行動。

The experiment, reported Thursday in the journal Science, may point a way toward eventual data-storage devices with vastly more capacity for their size than today's computer chips and drives.

《科學》(Science)雜誌週四報道了這一實驗。該實驗可能會爲人類開發遠超當前電腦芯片和磁盤容量的數據存儲設備指明方向。

'A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet,' said Harvard University molecular geneticist George Church, the project's senior researcher.

該項目的高級研究員、哈佛大學(Harvard University)分子遺傳學家丘奇(George Church)說，拇指大小的一個設備就可以存儲整個互聯網上的所有信息。

In their work, the group translated the English text of a coming book on genomic engineering into actual DNA.

這個團隊將一本即將出版的有關基因工程的英文書編譯成了真正的DNA。

DNA contains genetic instructions written in a simple but powerful code made up of four chemicals called bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).

DNA含有用一種簡單卻無比強大的編碼寫成的遺傳指令，這些指令由腺嘌呤(A)、鳥嘌呤(G)、胞嘧啶(C)和胸腺嘧啶(T)四種被稱作礆基的化學物質組成。

The Harvard researchers started with the digital version of the book, which is composed of the ones and zeros that computers read. Next, on paper, they translated the zeros into either the A or C of the DNA base pairs, and changed the ones into either the G or T.

哈佛大學的研究人員首先是從這本書的電子版入手，這個版本由計算機會“讀”的1和0組成。接下來，他們再把電子版還原到紙上，將0譯成DNA礆基對中的A或C，將1譯稱G或T。

Then, using now-standard laboratory techniques, they created short strands of actual DNA that held the coded sequence-almost 55,000 strands in all. Each strand contained a portion of the text and an address that indicated where it occurred in the flow of the book.

然後，他們利用如今標準的實驗室技術，創造出包含編碼序列的真實DNA短鏈，一共大約有5.5萬個短鏈。每條短鏈都含有這本書本文內容的一部分，還有一個表明它在這本書中位置的地址。

In that form-a viscous liquid or solid salt-a billion copies of the book could fit easily into a test tube and, under normal conditions, last for centuries, the researchers said.

這些研究人員說，這本書即使有10億份拷貝，也可輕鬆以這種形式(粘性液體或固體鹽)放到一個試管中，並且在正常情況下可保存數百年時間。

The technique likely is a long way from being commercially viable. But it highlights the potential of DNA as a stable, long-term archive for ordinary information, such as photographs, books, financial records, medical files and videos, all of which today are stored as computer code.

這種技術距商業化應用可能還有很長一段距離，但它凸顯出DNA可穩定、長久地存儲普通信息（如照片、書籍、財務記錄、醫療檔案和視頻）的潛力，這些資料目前都以計算機編碼的方式存儲。

'It shows that the vast increase in capacity to synthesize and sequence DNA can be applied to store significant amounts of data,' said pioneering synthetic biologist Drew Endy at Stanford University, who wasn't involved in the project. 'If you wanted to have your library encoded in DNA, you could probably do that now.'

斯坦福大學(Stanford University)具有開創型的合成生物學家恩迪(Drew Endy)說，這表明人類合成和排序DNA的能力大大提高，這個方法可用於存儲大量數據，如果你希望把自己的圖書館編譯存儲到DNA中，很可能現在就可以這麼做了。迪恩沒有參與這個項目。