The first ever DNA computer engine and storage device

The first ever DNA computer engine and storage device
A revolutionary approach to computing has just been published by a team of US engineers. Instead of using silicon to underpin our tech, the researchers have used DNA - the very molecules present in all living cells that encode the fundamental aspects of our existence. Teams from North Carolina State University and Johns Hopkins University have achieved this ground-breaking advancement, referring to it as a "primordial DNA store and compute engine." This innovative system is reportedly capable of solving basic Sudoku and chess puzzles. The DNA structure they have developed can be used for data storage and also data retrieval, computation, deletion, and rewriting and could be used to store vast amounts of data in just a few cubic centimetres. This could replace current servers in mass data centres that use vast amounts of energy and water.

From North Carolina State University the lead authors of the work, Professor Orlin Velev and Associate Professor Albert Keung are on the show.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ania Lichtarowicz.

More on this week's stories:
A primordial DNA store and computer engine

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello everybody, it's Gareth. This is the Somewhere on Earth podcast for Tuesday the 24th of September 2024. We're in London and we have guests well from the United States as you will be hearing. 

00:00:21 Gareth Mitchell 

And also, as you'll be hearing with us today is Ania Lichtarowicz, producer and editor of this podcast, but also wearing your expert commentator hat aren't you Ania, with a story that you're, you, we're basically we're going quite big on this one, aren't we? We're doing a single issue addition. 

00:00:37 Ania Lichtarowicz 

We are, and I wouldn't say I'm an expert commentator because it is quite complex and I think I'm going to be asking quite a few questions rather than giving it a kind of 

00:00:47 Gareth Mitchell 

We'll qualify that. 

00:00:48 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah. Yeah, I think you know. 

00:00:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Shall we say presenters friend. 

00:00:51 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah, just say presenter’s friend. Our other experts, our studio experts, but I’m definitely not one in this one. But this is the kind of thing that I saw it and I thought ooh, that looks interesting. And then the more and more I read I was like, oh, this actually looks really interesting. And then I kind of thought to myself, oh, I wonder if this is going to win maybe kind of a big science prize at some point. 

00:01:14 Ania Lichtarowicz 

If this technology works. I really think it could be the the one that triggered it. This bit of research. You know the the one that will be remembered for important prizes like, dare I say it, Nobels. I mean, I read it and I just thought, Oh my goodness me. 

00:01:30 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, well, you've been a science journalist for a long time. You've been around the block a few times on the journalism beat, so, you know, I I'm taking your enthusiasm, seriously, and it will be really interesting to see how this pans out, so Ania, you've teased that  brilliantly. We haven't said a word. 

00:01:47 Ania Lichtarowicz 

This is a podcast, so if there's something you kind of may not understand completely, just press the rewind button because I think it, some of it is for me. It took a while to get it into my head and to process it so that would just be my little kind of bit of advice for this one. 

00:02:02 Gareth Mitchell 

It’s a bit complex or dear listener just reassure yourself with the knowledge that however little you know about this, I know even less about it. Believe you me, so you will probably hear me during the interview quite often stopping and giving my idiots version of what I think they're trying to do to see if they agree with my assertions. So dear listener, 

00:02:23 Gareth Mitchell 

between you and me and Ania and our guests, we'll work our way through it and we'll certainly tell you why we think it's important and why we think it matters. You'll certainly pick that up and don't worry too much if you don't get all the finer scientific details. There we are reassuring note over. I think we should jump in. 

00:02:43 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:02:47 Gareth Mitchell 

We're devoting the whole show, really when it comes down to it, to the future of computing. Well, OK, let's qualify that. It's one possible technology, perhaps for the data centres of tomorrow. It won't necessarily replace what we have now, but it may have the potential to store all of the world's information in something the size of just a few cubic centimetres. 

00:03:09 Gareth Mitchell 

We're excited because even though humankind of course, has seen massive strides in computing since, say, you know, around the 1960's the underlying technology has been basically the same, based on silicon. But today, as we'll hear, we're kind of ripping up the textbooks on which my electronics degree was based. Yes, we really are. 

00:03:29 Gareth Mitchell 

Stay tuned. It's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:38 Gareth Mitchell 

It's not every day that we get to say this, but a whole new way of computing could be on its way. Not this year or next year, but possibly within about the next five years. So we're not talking like centuries off. You know, this is relatively soon-ish, but don't hold us to that  obviously. Now I can sum the gist of it up in just three letters. DNA. 

00:04:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, the molecules in all our cells. DNA that code for everything that makes us us, or indeed just about any other living thing. DNA is natures information store. So why not use it as our data store in computing? In fact, the idea isn't new, but the research up for discussion to date is using DNA not just for storing data, but for  

00:04:24 Gareth Mitchell 

retrieving, computing, accessing, erasing, and rewriting data as well. That's what teams from North Carolina State University and Johns Hopkins University in the United States claim to have achieved in a world first. They call it a ‘primordial DNA store and compute engine’. 

00:04:44 Gareth Mitchell 

And even now it can apparently solve simple problems like simple Sudoku and chess problems. Well, let's meet the researchers first, Orlin Velev, S Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering  

00:05:00 Gareth Mitchell 

at North Carolina State University. Orlin, what a title? Welcome along. So we're going to just try and pick our way through all this, but your contribution to the research has been like some kind of unique material on which this is all based, this fragile, well, kind of not fragile, but kind of fragile stuff called DNA, this molecule, but it needs a material to sit on, doesn't it? In order to do what you need it to do in this bit of science. So tell me about that. 

00:05:29 Orlin Velev 

Our contribution to this work is providing a material that can basically protect DNA for a while, while it has been stored, and that allows us to manipulate DNA in order to keep it protected and then move it around and maybe extract the information further. So basically we’re the material scientists in the team and the real important aspect here is the DNA information storage which has been provided by my colleague Albert’s work. 

00:06:03 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, we'll see. We'll get into that then. So your key materials aspects to this then as you say, it is the creating a structure in which the DNA can do its thing because DNA is a remarkable molecule. Of course, it contains the instruction kits that code for ultimately living things. 

00:06:23 Gareth Mitchell 

But is your point that DNA is actually quite difficult to work with, and so you need to just scaffold it almost into some kind of material where it's stable enough for you to use it in some meaningful way, and that's the bit you've done as I understand it. Is that right? 

00:06:39 Orlin Velev 

My outlook is basically that DNA is actually a pretty resilient molecule on its own for a while, but to, but it needs to be stored, it needs to be protected if one really wants to achieve long term storage of information. 

00:06:53 Orlin Velev 

And it's OK that we developed the material, invented the material that can do the job very well. And in addition to that it allows to add the magnetic component that we used to manipulate the DNA soft and dirty code. This our material complex. 

00:07:14 Orlin Velev 

So in what we have been discussing with people is basically if the DNA is the hard disk, we're providing the box and the handle of the hard disk. So one can protect the information and one can move it around by using our new material. 

00:07:30 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh yeah, we can run with that analogy. Well, definitely all roads point to Albert. This is Albert Keung, who's also another author on this paper. Associate Professor, University Faculty Scholar and Goodnight Distinguished Scholar, also at North Carolina State University. Welcome along, Albert. We've been talking about you behind your back there, haven't we?  

00:07:51 Gareth Mitchell 

So you are the guy who can tell us a little bit about the computational element here then. So, my, I did very badly by the way, in biology at school. So treat me like a beginner. But even I know that DNA carries these 4 letters, doesn't it? The A, T, the C and the G of DNA that are the instruction code for life. I hope I've got it OK. Yeah. So you're kind of working with this stuff. Pick it up for me. 

00:08:20 Albert Keung 

So DNA is A C T’s and G's and I like to, you know, tell my students that the human genome is 3 billion A C T’s and G and if you convert the A C T and G into zeros and ones, so for example A is a 00 and a T could be a 01, 

00:08:40 Albert Keung 

then you can essentially think about, convert your genome into an amount of digital information, and that equaled about 1 gigabyte. So the human genome was about a GB of data, about like a CD-ROM or a DVD. And why we're really interested in DNA, the information substrate, or storage material computational material, is because that 1 GB is just one of the 10 trillion cells or so in your body. 

00:09:13 Albert Keung 

And so if you take 1 gigabyte multiplied by the 10 trillion cells in your body, that means that you're literally walking around with more than all of the world's information in just the volume of your human body. 

00:09:27 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh, I love that. Wow. OK. And I love the way that you also said that you can think of, say, the letter A. I'm being arbitrary here, you might tell me I've got the wrong letter. But you know, the letter A could be 00. The T could be the 01. The C could be 10. So all I'm leading up to is that the entire computational revolution that's made all this stuff happen, that's enabling this conversation, and for people to hear this conversation, and all the other computing around it,  

00:09:52 Gareth Mitchell 

is based on binary, isn't it? It's like ones and zeros, but the incredible thing about DNA is it's quaternary. So each bit of information is made-up of potentially four options, whereas binary of course is either on or off. It's one or zero. And that's how you can sit there and just calmly tell me that our bodies can code like more than the sum total of human knowledge, and all the data in the world walking round. 

00:10:20 Albert Keung 

It also is a great illustration of how you know, we really are excited about thinking outside of the box and thinking about how information might actually exist and be computed upon in very different ways than we're used to. I think we're very much a binary focus, on off logic gated thought process when we think about computation and information. But biology doesn't work that way at all. There's a lot of  

00:10:54 Albert Keung 

kind of in between type of calculations, gray zones that are semi on or semi off. Kind of analog if you might put it that way, but many other types of analogies of ways that you might think about using biology or computing with biology or storing information that is just very different. And that that really is exciting because it opens the door for new potential capabilities that we don't have with electronic media. 

00:11:24 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, I can't wait to hear about those uses and capabilities. But before we get into all that, Ania, let's bring you in because you're very keen on doing this story and you are the one  saying, look, let's go big on this one. So what is it that's kind of lit up for you in this story. 

00:11:40 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I remember learning about DNA and just how exciting it was when I was like 16,17, knowing that these little tiny building blocks that match up in pairs that then kind of form this twisted ladder that folds in on itself and folds in on itself and then wraps itself around histones which are like these little balls of protein, I believe I might be wrong. I may have forgotten all my biology. 

00:12:05 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And it folds and it folds, and it folds, and it folds, and it folds. And we have just under two  metres worth of DNA in every cell in our body. And it is, it's all there. All the information is there and to kind of think that we can now use that instead of this 01 technology that we've been using all the time, 

00:12:25 Ania Lichtarowicz 

and say, look guys, you know, there's Orlin, he's developed this amazing sticky structure that seems to be able to have this coded DNA. Albert’s there saying oh we can store this data here on the DNA,  

00:12:39 Ania Lichtarowicz 

oh, but we can also do some clever things with it. We can retrieve it. We can do some computational things there too. I just was like, oh, this is good. And every time I read another bit, I kind of sat back and thought, oh, that's clever as well. And ohh, that's clever  

00:12:54 Ania Lichtarowicz 

as well. But seeing that I'm not that clever when it comes to this, I suggest we get Albert and Orlin in to kind of come back and talk to us because Albert, you've been working on this for a while now, haven't you? Since about 2016 and it was all this work that really meant that you could go further. 

00:13:06 Albert Keung 

Yeah, that's right. And and I think Orlin was a very gracious scientist. And, you know, I think a model for the type of scientists that you want to be, you know, pioneering work with and pioneering work for a society. I think the past 6-7 years that we've been, I guess 8 years that we've been working on this problem, there's a lot of things that we can do and that and that the field in general has done a lot of brilliant work on thinking about how to 

00:13:35 Albert Keung 

encode data, images, text, movies into A C T’s and G's, a lot of work on how to store it stably over long periods of time, and then, interestingly, in a pretty disparate field, there's been work on how do you do computations with molecule. 

00:13:56 Albert Keung 

Actually, a lot of that work inspired the system that we use to do computation, specifically. The challenge I think has been, and that really being able to work with Orlin solve, was that we want to do something practical, right? Ultimately that's what the field of both storage and computation with DNA wants to do. We want to create something that is practical, that is scalable, that the lay public will hear about it and be like, oh, that 

00:14:28 Albert Keung 

actually sounds like a computer, and so the challenge has been that you need to not only store the data and compute upon it, but you need everything in between. You need to be able to access that data after you store it. 

00:14:46 Albert Keung 

You need to do it repeatedly. You need to be able to erase data and add new data, right? You need something that is end to end that's compatible with the whole process and so that's what the material that Orlin’s lab has been working with and pioneered has, has really unlocked. 

00:15:09 Gareth Mitchell 

And it's a kind of sticky material then, isn't it Orlin, because I like the way that you said   look over on Albert's side of the research, they're the people coming out and designing the hard drive. We're designing the box that the hard drive sits in. 

00:15:20 Orlin Velev 

Right, right. I think that the cooperation that we established with our group is really an example of how multidisciplinary research can deliver new areas and new scientific directions these days. 

00:15:35 Orlin Velev 

Indeed, our material has been a new type of particles that are very sticky. And when I say sticky, that's kind of a little bit more special because sometimes stickiness, I mean you can associate it with gooey material if you like or some kind of glue. In this case, it's all physical. It is based on Van der Waals’ interactions. 

00:15:55 Orlin Velev 

There is this general similarity to the legs of gecko lizards which can climb on any surface. So we found out that these materials can be great ways to compartmentalise how birds DNA material so it can be then stored moved around, combined with microfluidic devices where one can use small volumes of liquid in order to store the information. So we contributed the material. 

00:16:21 Orlin Velev 

And really, Albert has been the pioneer of the information side, so hopefully our material would enable better storage of information, better handling, being able to really retrieve the right amount of the right type of amount of DNA.  And that's why we're very glad to cooperate on this project. 

00:16:41 Ania Lichtarowicz 

The way I understood it, silicon has an anchor, magnetic tape has an anchor and Orliln, what you've done is you've given this free floating DNA that's got this data stored in it, you've given that an anchor to, so suddenly your DNA is just like these other data storage devices, isn't it? 

00:17:00 Orlin Velev 

I think that it’s a little bit hard to compare the approach here to silicon, because you really have a liquid base part of the liquid type of process. Previously people have been able to manipulate DNA by attaching it to particles and having it on the surface of particles. However, this is not a very good way to protect the DNA because it can go outside. So now if we have a porous particle where the DNA can hide inside. 

00:17:29 Orlin Velev 

You can think of this as a tree where it kind of like goes and is being immobilized in the tree. This can be a better way to protect it and the way to store more DNA per particle. So that's basically our contribution. And from there on it is really the information processing that is opened by historic information in this biomolecule, and it's really amazing. 

00:17:52 Gareth Mitchell 

Presumably at some point, though, it needs to interface with, as it were, conventional computing materials, because you need to get the data into it somehow. I'm just throwing this around. Do you mount it on a chip surface or something like that so that you can at the very least give, upload an instruction set so it can even start to do any computing? 

00:18:13 Orlin Velev 

From our perspective, we really have a particle, so it's all in the bulk of the liquid. So we have a particle that can move together with the DNA around. So it is really not so much even the ability to mount it. But the ability to capture it and move it around. And then Albert can comment now how this enables the readout and the manipulation of the DNA. 

00:18:36 Gareth Mitchell 

And and that's just where I want to pick things up on the readout aspect there. So Albert, just to help me out with this then. So when you do some kind of presumably, quite simple at this stage, compute, what pops out the other end. Do you have like a great big plasma screen in the lab with a couple of numbers on it? Or is it a couple of molecules that turn a different colour and you read them off on a microscope? What are you actually looking at? 

00:19:00 Albert Keung 

That's a great question and it requires four different research groups to do this. So the system basically looks like little tubes, they're micro tubing, so sub millimeter diameter tubing essentially. And we have our our data stored in it on these dendritic particles that Orlin’s group made.  

00:19:21 Albert Keung 

And we use enzymes to basically copy the data into, the DNA data into RNA and then that,  all that microfluid, it’s really relied on expertise from Adriana San Miguel's group also at NC State. 

00:19:35 Albert Keung 

And that allows us to do all of this in an automated low volume, fast way and then once we have that copy of the information that we want, those RNA molecules can be put through what's called a nanopore sequencer. And so this is where Winston Timp’s group at Johns Hopkins University, they're experts on nanopore technology and sequencing and genomics, and what that does, is it actually gives you a live readout of the sequences that are coming through. 

00:20:06 Albert Keung 

And of course, back ending all of this is an encoding mechanism and decoding mechanism that's computational. That's really computer science, where you have to turn those strings of A C T’s and G's into images or texts. And so that's where James Tuck's group, who are the experts in that, and what you basically come out on the other end, what you see is images of drosophila embryo of cells, of airplanes. You can also put text for poems or movies,  

00:20:40 Albert Keung 

so basically what goes in is DNA. What comes out strings of A C T’s and G’s that we convert into digital files that you, that you think about? 

00:20:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Right, OK. So and quite a lot to unpack in that answer because I did mention treat me like a beginner here. So so here goes right. So you know you're talking about DNA, RNA, nanopore sequencing and what have you. 

00:21:02 Gareth Mitchell 

So I think to help me and others out is to not assume that you have something that looks like a display that I'm looking at now on my laptop, it's very different to that. You say it's DNA in, DNA, out. In other words, what we're getting to here is that this is all happening in DNA and then it goes into a sort of companion molecule, if you like, called RNA. 

00:21:22 Gareth Mitchell 

But it's some kind of molecule that pops out at the other end, I’m making it sound much easier than it is, and nanopore sequencing. There are lots of different forms of sequencing, but sequencing is when you read off these letters, isn't it? That's what sequencing is then.  Lots of different ways of doing it. You've just happened to mention one called nanopore sequencing and it's through that that you see some kind of molecule effectively and the answer is coded into that molecule. Am I even vaguely right? How? How am I going to do on my RNA nanopore sequencing exam here, anywhere near? 

00:21:54 Albert Keung 

Yeah. That's great. Yeah, that's that's great. It's perfect. You know? Yeah, you start with the DNA that's down to this tree-like particle. This what we call the dendritic particle. We use enzymes. They're basically molecular machines that can make copies of that into  

00:22:12 Albert Keung 

RNA, which is a different type of biological molecule, and the nanopore sequencing is exactly how you, what you what you said, which is you need to figure out a way you have a,  full of millions of RNA molecules and you need to know the sequence of letters of each of those molecules in order to get your data. And what the nanopore sequencer does is it feeds each molecule 

00:22:36 Albert Keung 

through a nanopore, a very, very small pore and through electrical sensing, it can detect whether an A is passing through the pore and then a C and then T, and then a G and it can give you that kind of electrical signal that corresponds to the letters in your molecule. 

00:22:56 Gareth Mitchell 

Now I'm not trying to be horrible here, but if if I want something, my laptop to do something, I type something in, it does it, boom there it is on the screen. You're making it sound very difficult here. What I'm fishing around for is, is this compute with potentially enormous power, but maybe a bit slow. 

00:23:12 Albert Keung 

Yeah, that's right. So it is not going to be doing, at least you know, we haven't envisioned yet it doing what your computer, your laptop can do or even what an analog calculator based on for those of you that grew up in the era of analog calculators, it can’t do that either, right. It won't be giving you an immediate response. It will take right now probably takes several hours to get to do a computation and get the results out. So the application space, at least right now in our imaginations and the limits of our imagination, is not the laptop computer. 

00:23:54 Gareth Mitchell 

So what is it going to be then? Cause I I was so excited until you said, by the way, this takes ages. 

00:24:01 Albert Keung 

Yeah. So what we're really looking at is large scale storage and computation that eat up a huge amount of land, water usage, cooling, energy and materials mining. And that have very outsized impact on economies, on environment, on climate. So these are things like huge data centers of which up to 60% of that data is actually not accessed, it's called cold. Meaning it's written onto a storage media and then saved but not used, but it still has to be cooled. Put into a data center house.  

00:24:46 Albert Keung 

And every several years, it actually has to be copied over to a new storage media because a lot of the conventional technology, these materials degrade over time. And then there's also applications when you're the AI revolution and machine learning, artificial intelligence, you also hear about how much energy these processes consume and so I mean one way to think about it is the most natural intelligence, our brain, consumes 100 Watts of energy, but we do really complex things. 

00:25:19 Albert Keung 

And so so DNA has that type of potential to do these very complex, very challenging computations that even with the most powerful computers right now, take days to run. We envision that we can do those types of applications using DNA. 

00:25:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Right, Ania. 

00:25:38 Ania Lichtarowicz 

When I first spoke to Albert, I just kept thinking back to the programme that we did on data centers and water usage. So a huge drought in Chile that's, will be going on for about 40 years. And the governments planning many, many 

00:25:52 Ania Lichtarowicz 

more data centers. So we're not only talking about huge energy use, but also water use and the environmental impact. And Albert, the DNA, it's so compacted isn't it, that you can actually store all the world's information in just a few cubic centimeters potentially? Would we be looking at maybe getting rid of data centers altogether. 

00:26:15 Albert Keung 

I think that there will be an increasing number of technologies that can specialize and address different needs. I think that DNA could take a huge chunk out of data centers, but there will be things that need silicon-based processing that’s rapid right? So e-mail servers and things that require  

00:26:39 Albert Keung 

fast responses, those will stay probably on silicon-based computing, but things that like full photos or even, you know, photos that you took last year but you don't really want to access all the time. A lot of the AI modeling requires storing telemetry data 

00:27:00 Albert Keung 

of the calculations that they're doing, basically histories of their computations, and these are generating massive data sets. All of those we envision trying to replace. And so cutting down the footprint of data centers, but not eliminating them. 

00:27:17 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah, absolutely. I could just imagine how much it would cut if I could store my photos on my phone. That would certainly help the speed of my calculations and processes on my phone. But also what about things like transport costs as well? Because if you're having to transport huge servers here and there. That's obviously a major impact with data servers. I'm assuming you know, again, because everything is so small  

00:27:45 Ania Lichtarowicz 

the whole concept of data centers, at least the DNA storage ones, would be completely different to what they are now. What, how do you envisage they would look? What would be their footprint on land? 

00:27:56 Albert Keung 

Yeah, I think it's really interesting that you mentioned kind of transport because I think I certainly did not know this before I started this work in this  

00:28:05 Albert Keung 

area and so I think a lot of people might not realize that if you need to move, if you need to transport or copy data from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States for example, or from New York to London or Earth to the moon or to Mars, right, transmitting something like a petabyte of data,  

00:28:25 Albert Keung 

which is not actually all that much. It's 1000 terabytes, so maybe 1000 times the size of your laptop, hard drive. The amount of time it takes to transmit that data can be something on the order of days, if not longer. 

00:28:39 Albert Keung 

And if you have like a, you know a company or or enterprise scale data set that you need to copy over that can take forever, it could take a year. And so actually what people often do is they physically load servers onto trucks and they drive them across the country and that is faster than sending it over cables and the Internet. 

00:29:02 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Wow. 

00:29:03 Albert Keung 

Yeah. And so DNA you can envision putting it into the FedEx box like an envelope and just mailing it. 

00:29:12 Gareth Mitchell 

That's a thought. This whole like, that's mad that people just go and put a whole load of hard drives on the back of a truck rather than do it through the Internet. Oh, the things you learn on this podcast. All righty. And just before we wrap it up by the way then. For one thing, we're not saying that this is going to be bring the end of silicon computing. It sounds as if it's going to be a compliment, a complimentary 

00:29:34 Gareth Mitchell 

technology rather than just chucking away everything we've ever known about computers, and clearly I'm not going to have this  

00:29:42 Gareth Mitchell 

DNA computing going on in my laptop, you know, it's just like completely different. And I do get that. But I suppose what I am just wanting to finish with is when do you think this might happen? You're doing some stuff in the lab at the moment, but you know, any chance of this being commercialised or becoming a reality anytime soon? 

00:29:59 Albert Keung 

I would not be surprised if in the next five years there were DNA storage applications for kind of long term cold archival storage of data. I think probably things like warmer  

00:30:14 Albert Keung 

data processes. Things where you're accessing the data every day or two, things where you're computing. I think those are more likely to be a decade or more out at least, but I would not be surprised if we see long term storage or kind of archival storage solutions popping up in the next several years. 

00:30:37 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Well, thank you very much indeed for telling us all about this, you know, brand new research that has come out and potentially this future really of DNA and RNA based computing and storage. Albert Keung, we appreciate it. 

00:30:56 Albert Keung 

Thank you. Thanks for having us. 

00:30:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Thank you, associate professor at North Carolina State University. From where we've also just been hearing from Orlin Velev. And thank you to you both and to you Ania. 

00:31:10 Gareth Mitchell 

Of course, there's more in the Podcast Extra in the subscription version of this podcast, but if you're not subscribing, then you might want to consider doing so. Just ten U.S. dollars a month. Otherwise we will see you this time next week. That's very radio thing to say, isn't it? Because with podcasts a bit timeless. But you know what I mean folks. 

00:31:31 Gareth Mitchell 

We will appear in your podcatcher in a week's time, with yet more technology goodness. But for now, from all of us, from production manager Liz Tuohy, producer editor, Ania you've been hearing there experting, Ania Lichtarowicz ,and me Gareth Mitchell. Thanks for listening. See you soon. Bye bye.