Development of chemical computers to store photos with small molecules

Scientists at Brown University in the US have found a way to encode and decode images, not by microchips, but by small molecules, with an accuracy of 99.5%.

This study was published July 3 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Picture 1 of Development of chemical computers to store photos with small molecules
Metabolism is any chemical involved in metabolism.(Source: newscientist.com).

Previously, biological molecules like DNA were used to help store information. However, in the new study, scientists used other molecules. These are metabolites that are smaller, more diverse molecules and have the potential to store information to a greater degree than the genome.

Metabolism is any chemical involved in metabolism, which is considered a necessary substance or a product of metabolism.

While conducting research, liquid-handling robots have been used to write digital information by turning compound substances into a system of small dots on a flat surface. A tool called a mass spectrometer can read positions and identify metabolites, then return the result as binary data.

This method of storing information with this small molecule can encode and decode information of images with an accuracy of about 98-99.5%. This method can successfully encode more than 100,000 digital photo bits into synthetic metabolites.

Lead researcher Jacob Rosenstein stressed that a chemical computer or molecular hard drive appears to appear only in sci-fi novels, but today's biology industry proves that this is possible.