from the where-did-I-put-that-femptoSD-card? dept.
Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard.
But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.
The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.
In one experiment outlined in a paper presented in April at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, the team successfully encoded digital data from four image files into the nucleotide sequences of synthetic DNA snippets.
More significantly, they were also able to reverse that process -- retrieving the correct sequences from a larger pool of DNA and reconstructing the images without losing a single byte of information.
Related Stories
Microsoft is purchasing synthesized strands of DNA to test DNA data storage:
Microsoft is buying ten million strands of DNA from biology startup Twist Bioscience to investigate the use of genetic material to store data.
The data density of DNA is orders of magnitude higher than conventional storage systems, with 1 gram of DNA able to represent close to 1 billion terabytes (1 zettabyte) of data. DNA is also remarkably robust; DNA fragments thousands of years old have been successfully sequenced. These properties make it an intriguing option for long-term data archiving. Binary data has already been successfully stored as DNA base pairs, with estimates in 2013 suggesting that it would be economically viable for storage of 500 years or more.
At a future price of 2 cents per base pair, or 1 cent per bit (ignoring the need for error correction), a terabyte would cost $80 billion (and weigh a nanogram). Once synthesized, copying it would be as cheap as using a PCR machine.
Also at TechCrunch.
Related: An Isolated Vault Could Store Our Data on DNA for 2 Million Years
Scientists Store Digital Images in DNA, and Retrieve Them Perfectly
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @02:11PM
These people should join forces with these people [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by redneckmother on Saturday April 09 2016, @02:23PM
Hmmm... are the data susceptible to virus attacks? Could the data "go viral"? Lotsa stuph to think about.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday April 09 2016, @09:23PM
How the genome of that invading mould sounds when played as an audio format?
How long to read an entire strand of DNA containing "a Walmart supercenter"? How long to encode it? If it takes 100 years, no thanks - the data will degrade before encoding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by srobert on Saturday April 09 2016, @02:27PM
Think about the variations that mutation could cause. A small dose of radiation and you get "Han shot last".
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday April 09 2016, @03:31PM
Use DNA RAID.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @07:22PM
DNA is already basically RAID 0. (except for the un-RAIDed XY in males).
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday April 10 2016, @01:22AM
Most human chromosomes do come in pairs in the way you describe. The complementary strands that comprise DNA could also be likened to a RAID mirror.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Saturday April 09 2016, @09:18PM
TFA:
Next question?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 09 2016, @10:56PM
Can they write it into a real human genome? I would imagine private key for identification, legal signing and border crossings. Viruses that target specific keys could be created as well I guess. And medications that are activated only inside a paying body. Many possibilities indeed.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2016, @03:05AM
Next question?
Why do they claim applying error correction to DNA replication is new, when for decades it has been known that natural DNA replication has extremely good error correction systems?
If I didn't know better I'd think they were just daft instead of self important, but the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
P.S. It's fun to watch DNA replicate, [youtube.com] esp. the part where it has to run through one the strands backwards because the teeth are reversed on one half of the zipper.
DNA even has something like VM bytecode translation, for just in time compilation. [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 10 2016, @03:40AM
In systems with heaps of redundancy and under evolutionary conditions? Perhaps even an immune system being present, to kill the defective copies? (occasionally failing and letting the organism invaded with cancer?)
Well, if you really want your "archive file collection" to evolve sentience or (with higher chances) to become extinct then yes, by all means, use the natural DNA error correction.
Otherwise, thank you, I prefer the predictability of hard determinism as used by the current generation of computers.
Fun it may be, by it's still a cartoon, not the reality.
Anyway, if you love this things, here's the primary source [wehi.edu.au]; you can get plenty of them: apoptosis, diabetes, vitamin D roles, malaria life cycle, origin of breast cancer...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2016, @10:41AM
Yeah -- they should study biology first before making claims about nature. DNA is constantly being broken down and rebuilt i.e. nature's using a far more advanced system than merely 'correction codes', not to mention that 3-dimensional format of the DNA -- it ain't just a straight double-helix folks, it's a wrapped & wringled double helix whose expression mechanism remains a mystery -- has an utterly important role to play too.
Biology (i.e. the hard core variant, not the light-weight 'look Ma I can do recombination' engineering-style bio-[gasp]-engineering which in large part is a money hack, a form of fools' gold) is still at a descriptive stage, with a couple of glimpses of what is probably an exhilarating variation in cause-effect transmission mechanisms.
I guess lack of respect, not to mention modesty, towards Nature is a pre-condition to being a bad engineer/tech-type.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday April 09 2016, @03:16PM
So just how many bytes of data am I able to store? Do fat people store more data then thin people? Will there be some kind of easy to use human-computer UI?
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Sunday April 10 2016, @03:43AM
Not what you asked, but the human genome (excluding mitochondrial DNA) consists of "approximately 3 billion"* base pairs. Since there are four nucleotides, each base pair carries two bits of information, so the human genome is ~0.75 GB of data, roughly what a CD-ROM can hold.
* https://www.genome.gov/11006943 [genome.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @03:38PM
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075931/ [imdb.com]
Demon Seed, do we have to say more?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:25PM
So, they are able to store pictures of horse porn inside sperm that was produced while looking at horse porn that was stored within sperm that....
...GAAAH, i think my kleenex box just broke.....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by cellocgw on Saturday April 09 2016, @07:31PM
My thoughts exactly. "Honey, I'm not splurging you, I'm giving you copies of my photo collection!"
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Geotti on Saturday April 09 2016, @07:36PM
In one experiment outlined in a paper [...]
More significantly, they were also able to reverse that process [...]
So, and exactly how long it take to store and retrieve these few megs?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2016, @01:20AM
Much faster to get DNA out for the male storage version.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Sunday April 10 2016, @03:25AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Monday April 11 2016, @04:11AM
I remember one episode of Star Trek where researcher Dr. Galen had discovered there was a message from our creator hidden in our "junk DNA" [imdb.com], however each race of people had just one portion of it. To make it work, all portions had to come together.
I considered this episode one of Star Trek's finest productions.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]