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...
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 ofporn 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.
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.
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
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.