Harvard Cracks DNA Storage

[flo]

I wish that the news was about decrypting the entire human DNA , maybe lots of diseases would be curable then

 

[Maxternal]

Yeah, it's a fun idea to joke around with but it would be nice if there was some correlation between the information stored by us this way and the information actually stored in cells but there's a big difference so the fact that our hard drive uses the same storage medium as cells has about as much correlation as the fact that both houses and trees use wood to build. There's a big difference in how they do it. You can neither necessarily nail a broken branch back on a tree and hope it will grow nor can you water your house every day and hope a new room will grow on.

Hard Drive:
G-C = 1 ... T-A = 0 ... binary information ... Done.

Cells:
different series of the above 4 options (G,C,A, or T) represent different amino acids only if both that sequence and the amino acid itself line up correctly with another section of DNA in a different part of the strand that has been converted into RNA (and I understand that's the simple version) ... proteins ... Done.


Maybe they use the whole pairs (G-C and T-A) because there's no way of telling which side of the DNA strand you're running down or maybe they can't control very well which direction it's facing when they tack it on and maybe RNA isn't as stable long term as DNA, Who knows. (I certainly don't have a degree in anything related to this).

I can see this technology bearing great similarity to a tape drive which (in their day) had large storage capacities but horrible seek times. I'd hate to have to defragment one but I'd hate to have it fragmented in the first place. Also, This would be like having a removable medium in a little bottle of DNA and then having to put it into the huge DNA sequencer to read it like having a tiny floppy disk with a HUGE disk drive.

At least making a copy of the whole disk should be fast since DNA's kinda made to copy itself. Terabytes and terabytes in a couple of seconds. Checking the integrity of the copies against mutation afterward might be a pain, though, unless their's some sort of internal hash and redundancy system like having multiple RAID chains. Even then, the more times you duplicate the disk the more likely you'd be to have errors and EVENTUALLY go through the tedious, drawn out process of checking and correcting the disk by resequencing the whole thing. Maybe it could have a tag representing how many times it's gone through such a process ... or maybe that's how they would create the redundancy in the first place, by making it split itself multiple times.

And although you could probably store some information in your cells, it would probably kill the cells you use which you're body would probably then get rid of ...

I kinda feel like I'm just rambling now but basically, very interesting achievement. Lots of potential. Long way to go, though.