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Encoding of a digital movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
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- Tossrock 9y agoObligatory Dresden Codak: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/07/12/fabulous-prizes/ http://dresdencodak.com/2009/07/12/fabulous-prizes/ edit: Sheesh, tough crowd.
- johnchristopher 9y agoI love Dresden Codak and this one is spot-on. I don't get the downvotes.
- ghurtado 9y agoThank you for sharing that, I thought it was awesome. I had no problems with the scroll of the site, so have an upvote so that others may see the link.
- tetrep 9y agoWhile I like the comic, I really wanted to give up before I got through the actually relevant/interesting bottom. The whole setup was really bad for someone who doesn't know and doesn't care about the characters. The author really could have just skipped directly to the "I'm going to go write over my junk DNA" bit and it would have been fine. Edit: So I assume people gave up and downvoted for the seemingly random comic.
- dekhn 9y agoThat you can store large amounts of data in DNA, and recover it, should be surprising to nobody. It should also be surprising that no matter how well it works, it won't ever become a viable product.
- tehlike 9y agowhy not? what if it is programmed to replicate itself to provide redundancy?
- gallerdude 9y agoMutations would occur, yeah? Mutant files, lol.
- gue5t 9y agoEvery medium decays; if you don't estimate longevity and perform error correction/migration/etc. accordingly, you won't be immune to data loss, just blindsided by it.
- dekhn 9y agoPeople who do this use erasure codes. Also, DNA kept in a dry, cold environment has an effectively infinite lifespan. Now, the interesting question becomes "what fraction of the the lifespan of the universe can I maintain my data with arbitrary accuracy?"
- djohnston 9y agothe biggest issue my non-geneticist mind sees with this is the issue of mutations.
- dekhn 9y agoNo, the reasons are about business any need. What does this product provide that anybody needs right now? Storage providers are not limited storage device availability - storage production is driven by demand from the providers, and the producers will make more if demand goes up. Next, existing technologies are more mature. They provide off-the-shelf products that integrate into a large ecosystem. So, DNA would have to provide some niche value that hard drives or flash drives don't. Finally, with durable storage mechanisms, you don't really know how well they work until you deploy many instances of the mechanism for their lifetime; for DNA storage, that would be billions of cells (or more likely, passive storage containers) for decades or more. So, I'll go with tapes, hard and flash drives and everybody else will too. MSFT made some claims about rolling out DNA_based storage in the decade-future, but they're blowing smoke.
- nonbel 9y agoI still can't get the paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754321
- joshgel 9y agoalways try sci-hub: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1038/nature23017 http://sci-hub.cc/10.1038/nature23017
- nonbel 9y agoDoes sci-hub give you the supplements? Most of the info is in the supplements for papers like this. That link is to the supplement.
- toufka 9y agoMost publishers dont put supplements behind thier paywall. Scroll down for the supplement.
- nonbel 9y agoYes, I go here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature23017.html#supplementary-information http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... The I click on "Supplementary Information (324 KB)", which leads here (which is dead for me): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nature23017-s1.pdf http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/na... So it is impossible to see the real methods for this paper.
- sharemywin 9y agoSo, the Matrix was wrong we won't be batteries. We'll be data storage.
- sushid 9y agoInterestingly enough, humans were never supposed to be used for batteries in the original script of the Matrix. Humans were supposed to be CPUs for the machines. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive-meddling-the-cause-of-humans-as-batteries-in-the-matrix https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...
- yellowapple 9y agoI think it was just humans who were wrong. Every time (IIRC) that it's been indicated that humans were used as an energy source, said indication has come from a human. Human batteries are a "simpler" explanation for why the Machines want to keep humanity enslaved, and it's unlikely that any of the humans are really mentally prepared to recognize that they're actually the CPUs (and possibly even the data storage).
- skosuri 9y agoFree to Read Albeit Horrible Interface Version: http://rdcu.be/t9oS http://rdcu.be/t9oS
- jimhefferon 9y agoSo if I encode Metallica into my dog's cells will the RIAA come after me?
- thinkingemote 9y agoOnly if you let your dog breed?
- DrScump 9y agoNo, but the Sandman might.
- gene-h 9y agoThere are number of problems with this, the big one being the difficulty of reading and writing DNA. In addition, while storage may be very dense, it is somewhat environmentally sensitive. IE a single cosmic ray can cause DNA breaks. This principle has been proposed to make a dark matter detector using sheets of synthetic DNA on gold[0]. It's also been determined that DNA has a half life of about 521 years[1]. Of course DNA's overlap does help with this in addition to the fact we can massively replicate DNA. Being able to massively replicate DNA can let us copy the same data an inconceivably huge amount of times so that we have a huge amount of redundancy. In addition, this ability has let us sequence DNA from neanderthal bones from ~50,000 years ago. But we might be able to do better using more stable molecules than DNA. Peptide nucleic acid or PNA is an interesting option for this. It binds together stronger than DNA while maintaining a lot of the benefits of DNA. Now if we're willing to throw away complementarity we could potentially store information with peptide sequences(proteins). We have recovered peptide sequences, albeit short fragments that were repeated numerous times, from dinosaur bones[3](although there are some worries with contamination here). Peptide sequences might get tangled up and will almost certainly be more difficult to read. We could potentially use a similar chemistry to that used in plastics for even more stability, although synthesis of large amounts of long sequences will be extremely difficult. [0]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/428391/revolutionary-dna-tracking-chamber-could-detect-dark-matter/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/428391/revolutionary-dna-... [1]http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555 http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11... [2]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7481/full/nature12886.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7481/full/nature1... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_nucleic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_nucleic_acid [4]http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070409/full/news070409-11.html http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070409/full/news070409-11.ht...
- basicplus2 9y agoOops honey, by screwing with these genomes I've accidentally created a unstoppable flesh eating bacterium.
- wizardforhire 9y agoOn a side tangent but loosely related to the mutation subject, does anyone remember songs that were deliberately designed to destroy music players? I ask because this would be an interesting attack vector. You could deliberately design a file that when compressed and stored in DNA would code for anything in the biosphere. Just an initial thought.