DNA can store information millions of times more compactly than any hard drive.
DNA can store information millions of times more compactly than any hard drive. Elya Vatel/shutterstock.com

A UW/Microsoft Collaboration Places a Digital Photo in DNA and Even Retrieves It Perfectly Intact: The University of Washington has recently begun developing research partnerships with the major players in Seattle’s tech economy. By expanding beyond the usual constraints of academic funding, the reasoning goes, scientists are given the opportunity to take greater risks and be more innovative. Or at least to avoid some of the stress of traditional peer review (more about this in my next column).

One such partnership, which involves a team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from UW and Microsoft, involves encoding, storing, and retrieving a digital photo by way of DNA molecules (PDF). It’s an innovative project, and far less esoteric than it initially seems: DNA can store information millions of times more compactly than any hard drive. And why should we care about efficient, nucleic acid-based storage? As a UW press release puts it, because “the world is producing data faster than the capacity to store it.” This new process "could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube."


A New Tree of Life Highlights Overwhelming, Invisible Biodiversity: Determining the evolutionary relationships of all organisms on earth—aka “building” a tree of life—is one of biology’s oldest and most fundamental problems. Historically, efforts to do so have been hampered by limitations on the data available to us, and by our inherent biases in observing the natural world.

The former problem, rooted in whether a given trait has something to say about relationships among organisms or or not, has been somewhat mitigated by modern molecular genetics and sequencing technology: It’s far easier to show regions of DNA homologous (similar due to shared ancestry) than morphological features that might be shaped by similar evolutionary pressures (like the wings on bats, birds, and insects).The latter problem, rooted in our tendency to study organisms we can observe and find most captivating, has proven harder to shake. A major obstacle to reducing this bias is that a majority of earth’s species remain undescribed. Since this is true even for charismatic, focal organisms like mammals, we can safely assume the amount of undescribed biodiversity we can’t see with the naked eye is mind-boggling.

This invisible, undescribed biodiversity is front and center in a new version of the tree of life published in the journal Nature Microbiology this month. Using ribosomal protein sequences (a unique chain of amino acids encoding the protein-building machinery of cells), environmental microbiologist Laura Hug and colleagues estimated relationships among more than 1,000 organisms, including previously unknown strains of bacteria collected directly from environmental samples. Their findings help put our own branch of the tree (Eukaryota) in tiny perspective among massive bacterial diversity, most of which is completely unknown to us. Stalwart science reporter Ed Yong provides additional context here.


Science(ish) Event(s) of the Week: Tonight (Wednesday, April 13), you should go see Dr. Hope Jahren and Sydney Brownstone talk about Jahren’s recent memoir Lab Girl at Town Hall. The book, which concerns female scientists love for trees (they have been around for 300 million years and humans could wipe them out within 600) her work in a world (the lab) that's dominated by males, has received lots of praise.



Also, an hour and half before Brownstone's and Jahren's talk, there will be at Town Hall a presentation on plankton research and ocean stewardship by Elisa Bonnin (UW School of Oceanography PhD student) and Jillian Lyles (School of Marine and Environmental Affairs).

If you miss all of this, you can go hang out in the UW Arboretum after dark on Saturday (April 16) and learn about nocturnal animal adaptations.