DNA Data Storage Is Closer Than You Think (scientificamerican.com) 72
"Life's information-storage system is being adapted to handle massive amounts of information," reports Scientific American, reports Scientific American, calling it "an alternative to hard drives" and noting that DNA "is already routinely sequenced (read), synthesized (written to) and accurately copied with ease.
"DNA is also incredibly stable, as has been demonstrated by the complete genome sequencing of a fossil horse that lived more than 500,000 years ago. And storing it does not require much energy." But it is the storage capacity that shines. DNA can accurately stow massive amounts of data at a density far exceeding that of electronic devices. The simple bacterium Escherichia coli, for instance, has a storage density of about 10**19 bits per cubic centimeter, according to calculations published in 2016 in Nature Materials by George Church of Harvard University and his colleagues. At that density, all the world's current storage needs for a year could be well met by a cube of DNA measuring about one meter on a side.
The prospect of DNA data storage is not merely theoretical. In 2017, for instance, Church's group at Harvard adopted CRISPR DNA-editing technology to record images of a human hand into the genome of E. coli, which were read out with higher than 90 percent accuracy. And researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have developed a fully automated system for writing, storing and reading data encoded in DNA. A number of companies, including Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, are working to advance DNA-storage technology... DNA bar coding is now being used to dramatically accelerate the pace of research in fields such as chemical engineering, materials science and nanotechnology.
"DNA is also incredibly stable, as has been demonstrated by the complete genome sequencing of a fossil horse that lived more than 500,000 years ago. And storing it does not require much energy." But it is the storage capacity that shines. DNA can accurately stow massive amounts of data at a density far exceeding that of electronic devices. The simple bacterium Escherichia coli, for instance, has a storage density of about 10**19 bits per cubic centimeter, according to calculations published in 2016 in Nature Materials by George Church of Harvard University and his colleagues. At that density, all the world's current storage needs for a year could be well met by a cube of DNA measuring about one meter on a side.
The prospect of DNA data storage is not merely theoretical. In 2017, for instance, Church's group at Harvard adopted CRISPR DNA-editing technology to record images of a human hand into the genome of E. coli, which were read out with higher than 90 percent accuracy. And researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have developed a fully automated system for writing, storing and reading data encoded in DNA. A number of companies, including Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, are working to advance DNA-storage technology... DNA bar coding is now being used to dramatically accelerate the pace of research in fields such as chemical engineering, materials science and nanotechnology.
1 cubic meter of bacteria (Score:3)
"The simple bacterium Escherichia coli, for instance, has a storage density of about 10**19 bits per cubic centimeter, according to calculations published in 2016 in Nature Materials by George Church of Harvard University and his colleagues. At that density, all the world's current storage needs for a year could be well met by a cube of DNA measuring about one meter on a side."
Now there's a data center I don't want anywhere near my town...
where's the speed? (Score:1)
The problem all of these systems has typically been an abysmally slow write and read process. Even if you can store massive amounts of data, it doesn't do you much good today.
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So what is the speed of a tape drive? Long term storage of very large amounts of data is still a technical problem looking for a less expensive solution.
I would not be so sure that there is not some mileage in this. Given that we often adopt ideas from nature in our technology. Where do you think that aeroplanes, vaccination, solar cells, advertising, agriculture, refrigeration and whiter than white washing powder came from?
DNA storage seems particularly attractive as a system as it already has natural repa
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OK, but if you copy existing systems to closely, be prepared for bacteria to eat your backups.
Well then. Do tell. (Score:1)
What is stored in my junk DNA?
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Well CRISPR for one thing. Though it is the CAS9 mechanism that is actually the bit we are excited about this week, there are also all the other CAS mechanisms to explore too.
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What is stored in my junk DNA?
Maybe this? [wikipedia.org]
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Not just DNA (Score:3)
DNA has been in use for billions of years, so the chemical infrastructure - coding, decoding, error correction, copying - is well-established, even if a little tricky to manipulate with human technology.
But otherwise DNA is not special. There may be other molecules that would be suited to storage of information, maybe even better than DNA. Molecular data storage, whether DNA or something else, could be a big thing. (Or maybe tiny thing.)
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The best molecule for storage tends to depend on what you want to achieve. DNA combines both information and actual execution of the information or rather instructions in a way that's very ti
Just like self driving cars... (Score:3)
...it is right around the corner.
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Self driving cars will be here soon enough. I like driving but there are too many reasons why society will want self driving cars more than flying cars. You have to look at the pressure to adopt a technology as well as the difficulty of creating it. If you think big data is a thing then the people with big data would like a way of storing it in something smaller than we currently have available.
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Definitely. Because you want it, it will happen. That is how things work. Things just magically happen because people want it. Mommy told me that.
Re: Just like self driving cars... (Score:2)
Worst article in Scientific American so far (Score:2)
DNA bar coding is now being used to dramatically accelerate the pace of research in fields such as chemical engineering, materials science and nanotechnology.
DNA bar coding is being used to dramatically accelerate the pace of research in chemical engineering? That's hard to believe. From what I understand, DNA bar coding is only used to recognize species [wikipedia.org]. How would that be useful in chemical engineering? How is it useful in chemical engineering? The article doesn't say. It only gives one example, to find improved medicine. Unless you consider medicine to be a branch of nanotechnology, it doesn't fit under any of the categories described.
That's ignoring the mai
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I am a chemical engineer carrying out research in Synthetic Biology (this area). I don't believe the hype surrounding DNA storage -- that is, unless there's a broad enough commercial market for Write Once, Read Never applications (or perhaps, Write Once, Read Once).
BUT, when they mention 'DNA barcoding' that is something that is actually useful in the broad field. Here is one chemical engineering example. Let's say you need 10 enzymes working together to convert a low-value feedstock into a high-value chemi
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convert a low-value feedstock into a high-value chemical product.
What kind of feedstock and resulting chemical product would those be?
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Been hearing about that for many years (Score:2)
What about the cost of storing and reading?
What about reliability? How is it supposed to be stored? In living organisms?
What are the read/write speeds?
Can the device to read/write data be miniaturized/made portable?
Re: Been hearing about that for many years (Score:2)
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The rest of the things you mention are legitimate concerns IMO
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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What he's saying is that we aren't good copies, and the reason there's anybody here is that with prolific enough production, and a very high "infant mortality rate" (most conceptions end in miscarriages, usually before there's any indication) weeding out failures on critical infrastructure (say cytochrome-C) you can get a corrupt version. (You don't look much like your ancestral lungfish.)
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A copy of '3rd quarter earn
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DNA is unstable outside of a host organism. Something will eat it. The host organism is so that enough copies will be made that some of the copies will survive. Too bad they won't look like the original.
Actually, it should be possible to design a four stranded DNA analog that would have much better error correction...but life hasn't wanted to head in that expensive direction.
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Perhaps the DNA of Species 8472 could be leveraged.
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Current storage devices have an error rate that low because they're built on top of a layer of error correction coding [ieee.org]. When you write a bit to a hard drive, the drive is not writing a single bit. It's actually storing the bit overlaid with ECC to provide redundancy and parity. (And the data itself is stored as
Re: Not even close, Tim (Score:2)
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1 m^3? (Score:2)
Great, another venue for sexual harassment (Score:2)
"So when was the last time you made a backup?"
"Are you hitting on me?"
But isn't the read/write speed an issue? (Score:2)
The fact you can store large amounts of data in DNA may be a huge benefit. But when you look at the relatively time-consuming and costly process to decode DNA, I don't see how we're anywhere near the ability to read the contents at speeds expected of today's mass storage devices?
Quartz Crystal Memory looks faster and more stable (Score:2)
Using quartz crystals for archive storage looks faster and more stable. Billions of years at a write rate of 100Mbs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Creates an interesting idea (Score:2)