Harvard Scientists store 700 terabytes on a single gram of DNA

[superpatriotman]

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-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.

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’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely…

more at link

[Enrique]

1. how many songs is that

[superpatriotman]

3. 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs

into a droplet of fluid.

[Scootaloo]

4. Almost all of them

[jberryhill]

5. And they send you more each month unless you cancel

[Blue_Tires]

13. how many, uh, 'erotic' movies is that is the proper question

[Curtland1015]

2. Amazing? Yes! Kinda creepy? Yes!

Like all cutting edge science... the implications are both great and unsettling.

[Scootaloo]

6. What's unsettling?

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]

7. That is pretty freaking amazing.

If I had possessed any aptitude for math I would have become a scientist of some sort - probably a cosmologist or something similar.

[yodermon]

8. hfs

I store wihin me the sum total of human knowledge
Paging Neale Stephenson, there's a serious cypherpunk novel here

[Lint Head]

9. Wow. I could be a walking movie house!

[bluesbassman]

10. Great, now I'll have to buy the White album again.

[kmla]

17. That response...

... made me laugh out loud.

[slutticus]

11. 1 gram of DNA is actually a lot of DNA!

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]

12. Finally, a reason to save my fingernail clippings.

[slackmaster]

14. I don't like the idea of keeping medical or financial data on a medium that can mutate

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]

15. So I can FINALLY add to my porn collection?

[entanglement]

16. DNA is a very high density storage medium but it has to be read sequentially, like tape.

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.