The French researchers who have managed this first drew heavily from this experiment conducted by British scientists in 2011 and which had allowed to see binary data (MP3 file containing the recording of the famous speech “ I have a dream “delivered on 28 August 1963 by the Rev. Martin Luther King) listed on an artificial DNA strand. The French did the same but on a much more convenient material to handle and maintain: Polymer plastic
Binary data written to a polymer
<. p> This feat was achieved by the Institute’s research teams of radical chemistry from the University of Aix-Marseille and the National Scientific Research Centre of Charles Sadron Institute of Strasbourg. Using the polymer blocks (monomers) as bits, they managed to write and to read the digital data written onto a plastic material.
The polymer materials are, like DNA, formed bricks joinable to each other to form repetitive sequences. By assigning the values 1 and 0 to these bricks, it is possible to recreate a binary message, to preserve it, to read it and store it. This polymer material solution is, for now, much more viable than using DNA and industrial applications more accessible to current technology.
Different architectures polymers
Progress to achieve before using polymer technology
In the present circumstances, encode a binary message of this material takes time. It is necessary to synthesize the message, monomer by monomer by hand. For a short message from a few bytes, the operation takes one working day. Reading this message is then performed by sequencing by mass spectrometer device type (such as to decode DNA) and takes minutes. Yet, therefore, only very short messages may be used. But with the automation of sequencing and playback, it will be possible to accelerate the process and the team of scientists believes it can exploit several megabytes of messages within a period of three to five years. In a first, barcodes or secret codes could be used in industry, data then very difficult to forge.
Photo Credits: Wikipedia Commons
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