Harvard Cracks DNA Storage

[Gahars]

So, DNA (or Deoxyribonucleic Acid for the ladies). Like any storage device, its main job is to hold data. However, instead of storing porn pirated software completely legitimate documents like your hard drive, DNA contains the genetic material that determines how you develop.

Now let's say you're a mad scientist (who happens to be employed by Harvard University) and you wanted to use DNA like an organic hard drive. How much information could you really store in there anyway?

Buckle in, kids, because we're diving into some real science-type shenanigans now...

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.

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

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.

Extreme Tech

It's a bit mind bending when you think about it: This is a 1 TB hard drive. (Going by the shipping weight for the sake of the example) It weighs 1.6 pounds, which is roughly 726 grams. With DNA, you could hold 193,200 TB of information for the same weight.

That's a whole lot of porn pirated software completely legitimate documents.

Now, it'll be some time before we can even dream of making the leap to DNA, and it's not all that fast at the moment. Still, once the kinks get ironed out and improved upon, we could be looking at the very future of data storage... and it was with us the whole time.

Huh. Science is kind of funny like that.

 

[emigre]

Could DNA storage provide a possible respite for Onlive?

 

[loco365]

Hm. Where's a link to download the whole internet? Pretty sure I'll have the room for that now.

 

[Bladexdsl]

coming in the near future: nintendo revolution complete with DNA drive!

 

[RupeeClock]

Suddenly the crazy twist of Megaman Battle Network seems feasible.

 

[KingVamp]

While it sounds nice, it also sounds kind of weird operating on DNA. Next will be DNA computers or pretty much DNA everything.

Who's DNA are they using?

With DNA Storage, you would be set for life.

 

[triassic911]

Huh. Fascinating.

 

[Rydian]

Gotta' love those 3-minute seek times, though!

 

[Gahars]

Could DNA storage provide a possible respite for Onlive?

They're renovating the old servers as we speak.

 

[nando]

that is very interesting.

 

[KingVamp]

Imagine 700 terabytes+ memery cards or

Could DNA storage provide a possible respite for Onlive?

They're renovating the old servers as we speak.

Mass storage devices we can stream from our own home/place.

 

[Maxternal]

Gotta' love those 3-minute seek times, though!

And you gotta keep your drive away from radiation and anything carcinogenic. I'd hate to have your information mutate corrupt on you.

 

[Bladexdsl]

Could DNA storage provide a possible respite for Onlive?

They're renovating the old servers as we speak.

no no no their batteries not storage devices!

 

[Gahars]

Could DNA storage provide a possible respite for Onlive?

They're renovating the old servers as we speak.

no no no their batteries not storage devices!

The renovations are quite extensive.

 

[OJClock]

This is a completely useless feat
Although DNA sequencing is becoming cheaper and faster every year this will never have any sort of utility

 

[KingVamp]

Gotta' love those 3-minute seek times, though!

And you gotta keep your drive away from radiation and anything carcinogenic. I'd hate to have your information mutate corrupt on you.

Yeah, you don't want it to grow into some kind of new creation.

This is a completely useless feat
Although DNA sequencing is becoming cheaper and faster every year this will never have any sort of utility

Why?

 

[Bladexdsl]

i wonder what would happen when you clone your hard drive? and can you find out if it's a boy or girl before you buy it?

 

[Fear Zoa]

I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where we have too much storage. So much room for information but not enough relevant information to store.

Also I can't wait for 5TB microsd's

 

[Maxternal]

LOL, that's funny but I didn't mean it like that.
Even though DNA can't grow by itself (it tells the cell how to grow) mutations are when the DNA changes on it's own completely randomly or because of cancer-causing substances or radiation or whatever. That's something you don't want to happen to your hard drive but I'm sure you can have the drive have a lot of redundancy and hash checks to make sure you catch it if it happens. When it's that small it's not like you're gonna miss the extra space.

Even with modern hard drives, you have to be careful not to get a magnet too close. Same concept.

 

[Gahars]

This is a completely useless feat
Although DNA sequencing is becoming cheaper and faster every year this will never have any sort of utility

If it becomes cheaprt and faster every year, then that seems to suggest that it's only becoming more and more practical.