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Harvard crams 700TB of data into a single gram of DNA

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Z

Zombie James

Banned
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...rams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
Click to expand...

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.
Click to expand...

Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.
Click to expand...

Incredible. Go science!

edit: Turns out this is from 2012.
 
A

Aquamarine

Member
so when are they going to release a reasonably-priced dna external hard drive?


i've had it up to here with the seagate + western digital cartel
 
B

BigDug13

Member
That's great for storage of unchanging data. I'm guessing read-write access capability and speeds are going to be a big stumbling block from this becoming the next wave of computer data storage.

Still, incredible achievement.
 
M

M0nochromatic

Member
bb-yeah-science.gif
 
M

Mailbox

Member
Aquamarine said:
so when are they going to release a reasonably-priced dna external hard drive?


i've had it up to here with the seagate + western-digital cartel
Click to expand...

If it ever becomes commercial it would be very expensive (even if it doesn't have to be).
Market capitalism and whatnot.

I can only hope for very affordable storage like this.
 
Tal Shiar Agent

Tal Shiar Agent

Banned
What's the read/write time?


Also, could we record data onto DNA and insert it into the genome of a common species? If so, would that block of DNA be able to remain unmutated or is there a chance it could mutate? Could this be a means of storing our collective cultural and historical selves through panspermia?
 
D

DonasaurusRex

Online Ho Champ
BigDug13 said:
That's great for storage of unchanging data. I'm guessing read-write access capability and speeds are going to be a big stumbling block from this becoming the next wave of computer data storage.

Still, incredible achievement.
Click to expand...

well theres volatile and non volatile if these numbers are correct , the archive problem could be solved. Non Volatile just has to be cheap and massive.
 
A

ahoyhoy

Unconfirmed Member
We could store the entirety of the internet, with all its amazing accomplishments and vapid entries both, in a handheld mass of DNA.

THAT'S AMAZING.
 
A

Archaix

Drunky McMurder
A gram of DNA seems like a hell of a lot of DNA.

What does a gram of DNA even look like? If somebody could answer this question without porn, it would be appreciated.
 
K

Kuntz

Member
Now for some reason I feel better about that Lucy movie ending...

It suddenly makes sense!

the spoiler:
she learns the secrets of everything and turns into an usb stick.
 
K

Kieli

Member
It's going to be a fair while before we see DNA hard drives, if they ever exist.

DNA is an organic molecule. Our body is able to access information stored in DNA with other organic molecules (histone acetyltransferases, transcription factors, RNA polymerases, etc...).

I can't even imagine how scientists will begin to use DNA in combination with inorganic molecules, lasers, and electricity to enable short-term memory access.
 
A

Aquamarine

Member
Archaix said:
A gram of DNA seems like a hell of a lot of DNA.

What does a gram of DNA even look like? If somebody could answer this question without porn, it would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

4d1Y35c.jpg


Figure 2.
TEM image with intensity profile and corresponding FFT pitch calculation of λ-DNA fibers. (a) DNA fiber TEM image. The inset shows higher magnification DNA fiber details; the red arrows point out the 2.7 nm pitch of A double helix. The scale bar corresponds to a length of 20 nm.

In panel b, a white rectangle is superimposed, showing where the intensity profile was measured. The peaks in plot c correspond to the alternation of bright and dark bands in the original image (b): plot c displays a two-dimensional graph where the Y-axis reports the pixel intensity integrated along the height of the rectangle and the X-axis represents the distance measured on the rectangle. Plot d shows the FFT of the signal displayed in plot c: a well-defined maximum is observed at 0.37±0.02 1/nm, corresponding to a frequency of 2.7±0.2 nm.

* 1 gram
 
D

Divvy

Canadians burned my passport
I don't trust this technology. Those bio-neural gel packs were always fucking up on Voyager.
 
D

Deleted member 13876

Unconfirmed Member
Finally we have the technology to turn ourselves into porn libraries.
 
S

Summer Haze

Banned
c28.gif


Seriously, though, science is fucking awesome. Imagine explaining to someone one hundred years ago that we are now able to store data in DNA. You'd be laughed at and labeled a madman. It would be incomprehensible.
 
S

sharkmuncher

Member
Archaix said:
A gram of DNA seems like a hell of a lot of DNA.

What does a gram of DNA even look like? If somebody could answer this question without porn, it would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Wilsongt said:
Uh... A gram of DNA is a lot... I am used to working in micrograms of dna...
Click to expand...

Eh, you can easily get almost gram or 2 of plasmid DNA out of a MaxiPrep. It doesn't look like much, just a white pellet at the bottom of a tube, or translucent, thread-like stuff if suspended.
 
R

Rush_Khan

Member
I'm not a biologist so can someone explain why DNA is incredibly stable that it could last hundereds of years in a garage, according to the article? Something to do with the strong hydrogen bonds?

Also, how exactly would the DNA interact with electrical equipment to synthesise and decode the DNA?

I actually find this really cool, but what's next? Biological logic gates? lol
 
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