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
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A few hundred feet inside a permafrost-encrusted mountain below the Arctic circle sits the seed bank that could be humanity's last hope during a global food crisis. This month, scientists suggested that this unassuming vault is the ideal space for preserving the world's data on DNA.
This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a bunker on the Arctic island of Svalbard, which for the past seven years has amassed almost a half million seed samples from all over the world. The idea is to use the naturally freezing, isolated environment of the far north to preserve the world's plant life and agricultural diversity—which, of course, is under threat by climate change and disaster. If a food crisis occurs, the vault could provide the seeds that repopulate parts of the world.
But it could potentially preserve much more than seeds. A study in the German chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie this month details the quest to find out how long data stored on DNA could be preserved, and also suggests the vault as the ideal storage location.
http://gizmodo.com/the-isolated-vault-that-could-store-our-data-on-dna-for-1687457772
[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract
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.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday April 29 2016, @06:35PM
Considering the vast amounts of data within me are expiring, being corrupted slowly (outside of Ozzy's influence), and ultimately subject to fatal degradation.... what's the shelf life on the new data storage medium?
I'm very interested in whatever error correction protocols Microsoft comes up with, as that would seem to have implications on aging in organisms.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 29 2016, @06:56PM
I'm very interested in whatever error correction protocols Microsoft comes up with, as that would seem to have implications on aging in organisms.
I am not a DNA magician, but I would guess they'll just use normal error correcting bits. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday April 29 2016, @08:01PM
The biological DNA is also subject to error correction mechanisms (and in addition features some redundancy in the translation from DNA to proteins, so some changes simply have no effect). And yet the DNA mutates.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Friday April 29 2016, @07:18PM
In addition to the potential for random mutations changing your data, this gives a whole new meaning to Microsoft's notorious susceptibility to viruses.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday April 29 2016, @07:50PM
from what I've heard the storage longevity of this method is really f'ing long.
The key is that the DNA is not stored in a living organism so there are no data corruption that would happen if it was being copied all the time by a living organism. Once created the DNA strands can just be kept in a vial on a shelf.
The data is encoded into DNA strands, then the strands are copied by a non error inducing method (no enzymes like in a living cell) and then the millions of identical strands are stored in a controlled environment, the proverbial "cool dark place". The only errors that would get introduced will be the ones caused by isotope decay changing the amino acid links and radiation damage. But since there are millions of copies, and the encoding method has error correction included, the actual risk of loosing and data is effectively zero. And when you think about how they have been able to get a good read of DNA from frozen animals from 30+ thousand years ago this storage method has real long term archive potential.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 29 2016, @06:49PM
At a future price of 2 cents per base pair, or 1 cent per bit
We can store 6 states instead of 4 by adding another base pair. [popularmechanics.com] I suspect we'll make more.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday April 29 2016, @07:42PM
It's like switching from MLC to TLC NAND! Cool!
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(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 29 2016, @08:48PM
I think you just won todays Analogy Award.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Friday April 29 2016, @09:40PM
Can I get this analogy in car form please?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kazzie on Friday April 29 2016, @06:52PM
The first thing that came to my mind, was Michael A. Stackpole's novel I, Jedi, in which the protagonist Corran Horn finds his uncle encoded Jedi lore into the DNA of flowers he breeds [wikia.com].
I stared at him gap-mouthed. "You digitized data and inserted it into the genetic material of a plant, allowing the plants to duplicate the code with every cell division."
"Correct. While random mutations might destroy little bits of the data, there are so many samples out thre that comparing them will fill in the gaps."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by devlux on Friday April 29 2016, @07:39PM
This is not a troll so please don't down mod me for it, it's just some hypothetical stream of consciousness stuff.
This gives me pause to think for a moment. Humorous, philosophical, whatever.
Between this and innovations like crispr. Imagine if some religious nutter decided to encode his holy scriptures into this, particularly the bits about God sending plagues, or striking down infidels or whatever, then appended it to a virulent disease such as ebola, or zika.
At first glance it would seem to be an ironic "striking down" of the infidels, but imagine the survivors who would of course have to build up a natural immunity to the disease.
Would it mean that the survivors were only the ones that were literally rejecting the supposed words of God?
Or the opposite. What if someone managed a cure for some horrific disease using
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virotherapy [wikipedia.org]
But the creator encoded in the virus some sort of scriptural element to go along for the ride, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art [wikipedia.org] .
Would it be that you were saved by the scriptures?
Does it qualify you automatically for salvation if the word of God is literally encoded in your DNA? :D
I'm extremely interested in how this tech shakes out. Not necessarily what MS would do with it, god knows I don't want my kid coming with a windows 10 style upgrade nag and a clickwrap EULA. But really what are the broader implications of this technology going to look like in a couple of generations?
Since the primary driver of all new tech is porn, you know someone's already trying to sort out a way to backup their porn collection to their DNA. Viruses tend to pick up mutations and host DNA snips. Do we really want someone's midget porn collection injected into our bloodstream because of a mosquito bite?
It would certainly give "thumb drive" a whole new meaning.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday April 29 2016, @08:00PM
Junk DNA that decodes into scripture for an ideological pat on the back is interesting, but non-threatening. Same with midget porn.
I'm more worried about getting diseases from mosquitoes than a book or pics.
The religious are already fighting against many aspects of bioengineering (gene editing, cloning, hybridization, stem cells, life extension). I don't doubt that some religious visionaries in the biosciences will do exactly what you describe, and that people affected could get upset over it. Maybe there will be a convoluted lawsuit challenging federal funding for gene therapy that includes a hidden religious message. Maybe routine scanning will be done to audit for such messages, which will lead to miscreants using encrypted messages or stenography instead.
An EULA or claim of ownership encoded into DNA would probably be struck down by the courts eventually. AFAIK gene patents still exist in the United States, but not for sequences merely isolated from nature or humans. There will probably be further court cases as synthetic sequences become more common. If you edit a novel, intelligently designed gene into a baby, and then isolate that gene, can that gene still be patented/copyrighted?
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by devlux on Friday April 29 2016, @08:20PM
Thanks that gave me even more food for thought.
Imagine a pregnant mom finds out the child she is carrying has a horrific disease that can be cured through genetic therapy in the womb.
The child receives a patented gene, or a gene which contains some sort of copyrighted data, property of Monsanto or Gerber or whatever.
Would the child need permission or a license to reproduce? The corrected genes would technically belong to the company. Any children born to that child would be carriers of the new gene.
I think we're starting to move into some interesting and exciting times on this front.
As an aside geneticists have recently become aware that there isn't nearly as much in the way of "junk" DNA as previously thought.
http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/junk-dna-helps-suppress-breast-cancer/81252315/ [genengnews.com]
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/01/22/junk-dna-just-extra-baggage-genome/ [geneticliteracyproject.org]
Would be interesting to see what happens if we messed around with the bits that encode for Telomerase reverse transcriptase
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by JNCF on Friday April 29 2016, @09:27PM
someone managed a cure for some horrific disease using
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virotherapy [wikipedia.org]
But the creator encoded in the virus some sort of scriptural element to go along for the ride, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art [wikipedia.org] .
Would it be that you were saved by the scriptures?
Does it qualify you automatically for salvation if the word of God is literally encoded in your DNA? :D
But the cure was too little, and too late. The global machine had already ground to a halt. From the ashes of civilization small bands of scripture-enscribed humans began forming, began dismantling all the artifacts of old. They couldn't use the circuit boards and combustion engines - they had no fossil fuels or power plants. But they could harvest the raw components.
As language and culture changed, the memory of The Time Before The Disease became shrouded in myth. The few texts that claimed to predate it - mostly religious ones - had been translated from old languages to new ones many times over thousands of years. Few believed they were as old as they claimed (and some of them weren't), but they provided a series of Rosetta stones on which researchers could hop when they rediscovered DNA and the strange encoded messages it contained. These messages would form the basis of all religious thought going forward, and when the singularity came the machine-godling that emerged looked down at the rotting corpse of humanity and it concluded that there had most likely been a One True God.
It would take hundreds of millions of years for the machine to find another post-singularity consciousness in cosmos. This is when The Holy War started.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Friday April 29 2016, @09:35PM
I like what you did there and it's a good read!
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 29 2016, @10:03PM
Thanks! Besides the singularity bit at the end, I thought that's where your post was headed while I was reading it.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 30 2016, @06:22AM
Kind of rare I say this, but I think you've inspired me to write a Sci-Fi book. Mind if use that as part of the epilogue?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday April 30 2016, @07:27AM
Not at all! Ideas are meant to be stolen. I'd be interested to hear about it if you ever publish in any form, but don't feel an obligation to remember that. Have you written other scifi books?
This thread was vaguely reminding me of an Asimov story earlier (spoiler warning). Asimov wrote a novel (originally a short story) called Nightfall which took place on a planet in a solar a system with 8 suns. Since the inhabitants of the planet were constantly surrounded by sunlight they never saw the night sky, and so their entire worldview was based on a 9-body universe. Once every many-thousand-years the suns aligned perfectly with a normally unobservable moon, causing an eclipse. Then the people see for the first and only time in their lives the night sky filled with countless stars, and are suddenly forced to confront the reality of how vast the universe is. It drives everybody mad, they start burning everything to try and blot out the sky with light. Even after daybreak there are violent crazies running around, and lots of folks are dead. Society has to rebuild again from ground zero. A major part of the plot involves a church which is predicting a mythology-enhanced version of the event because of accounts from previous cycles of civilization-wide collapse.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 30 2016, @07:54AM
I'm an amateur author at best. Nothing published and sadly I tend to start books and then develop a serious case of writers block and not look at the thing for a couple of years.
I'm on Wattpad, same nick here and there. You should check it out sometime. There are tons of great authors on there.
Right now I'm working on 3 books. I got partway through the first book before I realized I was actually writing a sequel to another story and that the story I was writing literally made no sense without the first story as a framing context. Both books are trying really hard to be hard sci-fi; However I'm using it as a tool to extrapolate my own views on transhumanism, futurism, the seat and source of consciousness and why we as a species seem hell bent on feeling religious; It's starting to complicate. Partly because my own views are so fluid. One day I hope it will all come together, but you gave me a great idea on how to end the first book. The entire series presupposes that time is not linear, that multiverses are real, that humanity periodically "reboots" itself and that these reboots are encoded in our language and has left marks in our DNA. The gods are real, we are them, they made us and we made them. :D It only makes much sense if you assume that we are the universe trying to figure itself out.
The other book I am writing is just a silly children's story I'm writing for my kids. Pure Wizard of Oz style fantasy to explain to my kids why their mommy and I have such a complicated relationship and I'm away from home so much.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday April 30 2016, @08:08PM
I'm loving Yggdrasil as a metaphor/name for the multiverse. Shooting from the hip and recognizing that you could be wrong, how do you feel about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?
I also liked the bit about the sun being the living eye of Odin and Jupiter being the dead eye, I'm assuming it presupposes that Jupiter was burning brightly in a spectrum visible to humans within the memory of human culture.
I've been jotting down some grammar corrections/suggestions as I go, if you're interested in seeing them you should leave a way for me to send you a private message. I can post them here if you want, but I hate critiquing grammar on the internet for purposes other than humor. I'm nowhere near finished yet, so it might take a while for me to get back at you.
You might really get a kick out of Dorion Sagan's Notes From The Holocene. He sees life as a primarily thermodynamic phenomenon, and suggests that the meaning of life may be the consumption of energy gradients. He sees life as an entropy engine fine-tuned by nature to burn slow enough that it doesn't extinguish itself, and believes that humans may have upset that balance. He also has some funny/interesting views on consciousness. I think it's a good food-for-thought book for the right person. I didn't swallow all of his pills, but it definitely changed how I think about some things.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 30 2016, @09:34PM
Wow, I'm really glad you're enjoying it! Good job picking up on the Yggdrasil / Multiverse dynamic, they few people who have read it you're the first person to elucidate on that.
It's there because when I look at the "multiverse" I see a tree. It sounds like an analogy, but I feel more like I'm on the edge of a canyon glimpsing something at the far end, and "tree" is the only word my mind has for what it sees. Same thing with the "web" which I doubt you've gotten to yet.
They're equal views of the same information, drawn from the perspective of different manifestations of the same universal forces.
Best place to talk to me about the Wayfarer's Saga is Wattpad, just signup and you can PM me there anytime. That and soylent are the only social networking vices I allow myself :D
Keep in mind, both books thus far are basically being written at the same time, and things may shift around a lot. I'm not married to any of my ideas except that book 1 is Loki's journey and book 2 is Sandra's. The whole excersize is me using a fictional environment to explore certain concepts that are tumbling around in my mind.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Friday April 29 2016, @11:09PM
Given the size of it (over 3 billion pairs [wikipedia.org]), the word of many Gods are literally encoded in a human DNA - one need only to find the appropriate One Time Pad [soylentnews.org] to decipher it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 30 2016, @05:47AM
Valar morghulis ?
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 30 2016, @02:04AM
> It would certainly give "thumb drive" a whole new meaning.
"script kiddie" also has a potential.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Friday April 29 2016, @08:53PM
I see some problems with this application of technology:
* Retention time.
* Encoding cost.
* Risk of dangerous data sequences being encoded by mistake.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Friday April 29 2016, @09:16PM
Also duplication could be an issue.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JNCF on Friday April 29 2016, @09:51PM
Nah, duplication is easy as fuck.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 29 2016, @11:26PM
I covered duplication in the summary. That part is cheap and easy.
Although maybe there will be issues if a PCR is used on a sequence with trillions or quintillions of base pairs all in one strand.
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(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 30 2016, @05:16AM
Nah, you missed the point. Not saying it would be too hard, I'm saying it would be too easy. As in it could spread.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Non Sequor on Friday April 29 2016, @10:36PM
Microsoft is paying money for DNA. Everyone! Send your DNA to Microsoft!
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday April 30 2016, @12:52AM
Unless we hit on some rad way to read/write DNA this is only archival storage on a scale even tape libraries do not approach. But we do need something that solves this problem, none of our current storage media last as long as a well made book.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday April 30 2016, @01:46AM
s/book/stone tablet
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday April 30 2016, @01:35AM
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsofts-digital-nervous-system/ [techrepublic.com]
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 30 2016, @02:10AM
Hold on, perhaps that junk DNA of ours has encrypted data...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Saturday April 30 2016, @08:32AM
It actually, really..has a virus? Awesome. :)