DNA as a possible method of data storage just moved a step closer towards viability, after researchers found a way to make such data searchable and directly accessible. The University of Washington researchers encoded four images in DNA, then were able to retrieve them perfectly using a technique called Huffman Coding, which is normally used in lossless data compression.

The idea of storing data in DNA has come a long way in the last few years. Back in 2012, a team of Harvard researchers showed how its possible to store 5.5 petabits (5,500 terabits) of data in a cubic millimeter of DNA. Then, in 2013, the European Bioinformatics Institute revealed it had successfully managed to retrieve data from DNA by sequencing it. All well and good, except that DNA sequencing is enormously expensive, rendering DNA storage all but useless if there’s no other way to retrieve the data.

Except that’s no longer the case.

“Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works — it’s very, very compact and very durable,” said co-author Luis Ceze, associate professor of computer science and engineering, in a statement. “We’re essentially repurposing it to store digital data — pictures, videos, documents — in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years.”

In order to store data in DNA, it’s necessary to convert the binary code into the four nucleotides that DNA is made of. Once done, the DNA can be synthesized (turned into something physical) with the data encoded within it. It’s fairly straightforward to replicate this DNA, as Technicolor showed just last week when it stored one million copies of a movie in a small vial of water.

Storing movies in water is pretty cool, but making the data searchable and accessible is probably even cooler.

“Suppose you have a large amount of information encoded in DNA in a big pool — think petabytes,” Ceze explained. “That information is stored in a large collection of small DNA molecules. How would you read just a small specific part of the data, say a video in a large video collection? Without random access you need to access the whole thing until you find what you want. With random access, you can access the desired data directly.”

Even with these advances, experts say that DNA storage is still prohibitively expensive, for now at least. The process of synthesizing DNA also still needs to be perfected and simplified. But even so, this new ability to search and access DNA data directly does bring the concept a big step closer to viability.

Here’s a link to the researcher’s full paper, if you’re interested in the nuances of how they actually did it.

Image credit: PublicDomainPictures via pixabay