7 ms·

the biggest issue my non-geneticist mind sees with this is the issue of mutations.

dekhn 9y ago
No, 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.
- y7 9y ago
  Your reasoning is flawed (and frankly, phrased slightly annoyingly in your other comments, in a way where you omit your core arguments in what seems like baiting for replies). DNA storage provides durability [1] and information density (per weight) [2] beyond any current technology. 1: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract;jsessionid=98CF741BB3403A90D116E88837C59A01.f02t01 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/ab... 2: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950
  - dekhn 9y ago
    That's not higher density because nobody actually made something that stores a unique terabyte in DNA. The Science paper stored a megabyte. Ewan Birney's paper stored a concatenation of the same string over and over again. Showing you can store a tiny amount of data and then claiming you have a density higher than hard drives isn't just poor marketing, it's outright lying. To show durability, you need to actually test things for the planned lifespan, or use intelligent mechanisms to test in a shorter lifespan. Then you can claim durability.

No, 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.

y7 9y ago
Your reasoning is flawed (and frankly, phrased slightly annoyingly in your other comments, in a way where you omit your core arguments in what seems like baiting for replies). DNA storage provides durability [1] and information density (per weight) [2] beyond any current technology. 1: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract;jsessionid=98CF741BB3403A90D116E88837C59A01.f02t01 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/ab... 2: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950
- dekhn 9y ago
  That's not higher density because nobody actually made something that stores a unique terabyte in DNA. The Science paper stored a megabyte. Ewan Birney's paper stored a concatenation of the same string over and over again. Showing you can store a tiny amount of data and then claiming you have a density higher than hard drives isn't just poor marketing, it's outright lying. To show durability, you need to actually test things for the planned lifespan, or use intelligent mechanisms to test in a shorter lifespan. Then you can claim durability.