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I would not be so sure whether it is really necessary or advantagious to have very long DNA strands as information medium. Long DNA strands are very hard to han

by patall 10y ago

I would not be so sure whether it is really necessary or advantagious to have very long DNA strands as information medium. Long DNA strands are very hard to handle under many conditions (we only got into the range of 1 million bp reads last week, it probably wont be in the near future that we get some at a reasonable fraction) and provide limitations like increased replication timing (Polymerase work in the order of 1kbp per minute, else you would need many origins of replication). Shorter fragments (~1kbp) are much easier to handle and sequence and can be reached by almost random access through primers attached to fishing beads.

entee 10y ago
Very much agreed, but then you're stuck with ensuring all the pieces of DNA are faithfully transmitted through the next replication. Essentially you're proposing having tons of 1kbp chromosomes, so you're shifting the problem from having a hard to handle piece of DNA (the longer the harder it is to have it not sheer/break/otherwise get damaged) to faithfully moving around lots of tiny pieces of DNA, and maybe depending on the system needing to guarantee not losing one of them entirely, or ensuring that the copy number of each one doesn't deviate too much from all the others, or both. I think yours is probably the right way, though.