Team:Tsinghua-A/Human Practices
Possible application of DNA data storage
To deeply understand what DNA storage can do for the world, we carried out an in depth investigation into the current Data Storage Area:
Big data era and advantages of DNA data storage
We first summarized the developing history of storage need and storage media from ancient to today's Big Data Era. Focusing on the new data storage need in this new era, we investigated the amount of the generated data and the major data source. Facing the new challenge in big data era, we explored the appealing properties of DNA data storage, which gave us confidence to choose this area. We put the content in this section on our background page, which may also be a good materials for educating the public about the data storage area.
Practical Applications for DNA data storage
The world is producing extreme large amount of data in the Big Data era, but how much data has the value to be stored? And how many of the data can is suitable for using DNA to store? We made a further investigation on this issue in the first section
Cold data and DNA Storage
need for storing cold data
In the massive data generated by enterprise operations and sensor networks, in addition to the data that is critical to business and needs timely access, there are also a large number of data with low access frequency. We turn the latter into cold data.
Fast data access will use the latest drives, fastest transport protocols, and be located near to the client or in multiple regions as needed. Cloud data storage providers charge a premium for hot data storage because it’s resource-intensive. Moreover, research has shown that cold data accounts for about 90%. Therefore, offering separate storage and access methods for cold data is an effective way to solve the problem of excessive data storage costs.
Companies have some options to deal with cold data,including cloud-based cold storage and performing annual evaluations of cold storage data. These methods can help to a certain degree, but still cannot completely solve the problem. The storage density of the devices used is increasingly difficult to adapt to the requirements of data growth, and the cost of cloud storage and data maintenance is also unsatisfactory.Companies have some options to deal with cold data, including cloud-based cold storage and performing annual evaluations of cold storage data. These methods can help to a certain degree, but still cannot completely solve the problem. The storage density of the devices used is increasingly difficult to adapt to the requirements of data growth, and the cost of cloud storage and data maintenance is also unsatisfactory.
scientific instruments
There are large numbers of scientific instruments supervising our world. We have astronomical telescopes observing the vast universe. We have marine thermometers measuring the effect on ocean temperature cause by global warming. We have satellite remote sensing which is recording the dynamic change trend of lower atmospheric. These instruments are producing valuable data for scientific research continuously. In the future, we may use the data to analyze the dynamic change trend of our planet and predict the future trend. So it’s important to keep vast data for surprisingly long time.
Transmission of vast amount of data
In some situations a vast amount of data is difficult to transfer through the network, limited by the bandwidth. It can be very resource intensive and time consuming. In this case it may be more efficient to use DNA as physical transmission media. Take space exploring for example: when human beings immigrate to the Mars, we need to take all our data in the spaceship to revitalize the human civilization. DNA storage can obviously reduce the burden and save up fuel.
People's idea on what can be stored in dna & Content of Our experiment
To find more possible application and investigate the public’s opinions about DNA storage, we did a survey. There are some interesting ideas, and we choose two of them to actually synthesis to dna:
Tsinghua bamboo slip
We tried to encode ancient text and store it in DNA and also tested the feasibility. We analyzed the efficiency of coding, error correction ability, encryption and other aspects to promote its function. In order to test our as assumption, we carried out an experiment with a 2,300-year-old bamboo slip from the warring states period, which was collected by tsinghua university in July 2008.
Ancient bamboo slips are valuable historical relics. Talking of the purpose of doing this experiment, in addition to exploring the application scenarios of the project，we also hope to arouse people's attention to the protection of cultural relics and popularize Chinese culture.
Assassin's Creed: DNA memory
As people gradually realize the potential value of DNA storage, many ideas about storing information with DNA have been proposed one after another. The most famous one is the video game "Assassin's Creed" series produced by Ubisoft. The game envisions a rare DNA structure that can interpret the memories of the ancestors of the millennium, thereby restoring unknown historical details and searching for lost ancient artifacts. According to the game background, the player enters the memory of the ancestors through the fictional equipment produced by the near future technology company to pursue the ancestral footprints and solve a series of historical mysteries.
The first work of Assassin's Creed was published in 2007, when the concept of DNA storage was still unfamiliar to most people. It can be said that the concept of Assassin's Creed is very creative, inspiring and forward-looking. Therefore, we decided to pay tribute to this work by depositing the lines from the Assassin's Creed in our experimental DNA sequence.
Insight into the field
At the first stage of our project, we discussed our idea with professors whose major research fields are synthetic biology and bioinformatics. Following their directions, we noticed the potential value of DNA storage and established the subject.
In order to have an insight into the current development and the significance of synthetic biology, we visited two enterprises: SygenTech and GENEIS. We visited their offices and labs and had an interview with them, from which we learnt about the bright future as well as the development dilemma of this field.
We presented our project in the 5thSynthetic Biology Young Scholar Forum, held in Tianjin, China. Focusing on the most cutting-edge synthetic biological science theories and technology that is current with the world's leading Synthetic Biology research, the forum provided an open platform for exchanges and collaborations between like-minded young synthetic biology researchers at home and abroad.
Popularizing social value
Middle school student communication
We hope to make our research accessible to more people and make contributions to popularizing the remarkable achievements of synthetic biology. Therefore, we went to exhibit our project and popularize biology knowledge in the China Science and Technology Museum to middle school students.
We presented in an attractive way and designed some interactive activities and developed a software showing the encoding-decoding process in an intuitive way, which may help to understand our project better.
Both the stuff of the museum and the students gave positive feedbacks. We also enjoyed answering their questions. We sincerely hope they can be attracted by our presentation and devote themselves into synthetic biology in the future.
A lecture for THU students
We also held a lecture with the help of the association of science enthusiasts, department of automation, Tsinghua University. The theme of the lecture is introduction to scientific research and encouraging junior students to take an active part in the projects. We recommended IGEM to them, introduced our project and shared our rewarding experience. We hope that universities can pay more attention to science innovation competitions and more students in Tsinghua would take part in iGEM.
Collaboration
Team BIT-China
We have deep collaboration with Team BIT-China and both have advantages to improve our project. Most team members of BIT-China have biological background while our team is better at information technology. They gave us some instructions on biological experiments, counteracting our lack of this area. In return, we helped them with mathematical modeling, wiki editing and visualization of the experimental results. The communication and collaboration with Team BIT-China opened up our view on synthetic biology and inter discipline.
Team Tsinghua
There is another team from our school, Team Tsinghua. We had close contact throughout the project in many ways, such as discussing about the process of the competition and registration. Besides, we went to the China Science and Technology Museum together to exhibit our project and popularize biology knowledge to middle school students.
iGem Meetup in Beijing
On August 6, we participated the iGEM Meetup in Beijing, hosted by BIT-China 2019. BIT-China, Tsinghua-A, Tsinghua, UCAS-China, Peking, OUC-China, CAU-China and BNU-China participated in the meet-up. During the meetup, eight teams presented their projects, shared ideas and exchange suggestions. After the meetup, we discussed about the possibility of deeper cooperation.
social enterprises
In order to come into more contact with social enterprises, we cooperated with iGeneTech, a high-tech enterprise specialized in DNA synthesis and sequencing. They helped in synthesizing our DNA parts and sequencing. Using the returned data, we did more analysis and checked the experiment results.