General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHarvard Scientists store 700 terabytes on a single gram of DNA
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-grammore at link
Enrique
(27,461 posts)superpatriotman
(6,247 posts)into a droplet of fluid.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)jberryhill
(62,444 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)Curtland1015
(4,404 posts)Like all cutting edge science... the implications are both great and unsettling.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)DNA is simply a chemical chain. Nothing more.
Living cells "read" the DNA built into their structure to perform their functions, but outside the cell, it's just an interesting sugar, basically.
Even if something weird were to happen, and someone's iTunes DNS were to be added to cells, what would happen is that the cell would just die, since the "programmed" DNA doesn't tell the cell to do anything useful for that cell.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)If I had possessed any aptitude for math I would have become a scientist of some sort - probably a cosmologist or something similar.
yodermon
(6,143 posts)I store wihin me the sum total of human knowledge
Paging Neale Stephenson, there's a serious cypherpunk novel here
Lint Head
(15,064 posts)bluesbassman
(19,372 posts)kmla
(4,047 posts)... made me laugh out loud.
slutticus
(3,428 posts)I wonder what the efficiency of this is (i.e. what percentage of base pairs are used in actual storage?)
But one gram of DNA would definitely NOT fit in a little droplet. I also wonder how large these fragments are. If you concentrate the DNA too much, the viscosity of the solution may be detrimental to the DNA and you could get fragmentation which could compromise your "data" (not to mention rogue DNAses and Cu++ ions). Still, storing 700TB in a liter of water sounds kinda neat. I wish the article was more technical. Maybe they're lyophilizing the DNA for storage? That would be a MUCH smaller footprint.
Peepsite
(113 posts)slackmaster
(60,567 posts)As reliable as they have become compared to years past, even conventional hard drives have gotten so capacious that the tiny likelihood of a failure has morphed into high likelihood that any given device will have errors.
sofa king
(10,857 posts)entanglement
(3,615 posts)This work is great for archival purposes, not so much the kind of rapid, random access, day-to-day storage tasks that make hard disks so successful.