4 ms·
That is an interesting thought. I take this with a grain of salt, one gram of DNA is supposedly 455 exabytes of data.
by Sparkyte 3y ago
That is an interesting thought. I take this with a grain of salt, one gram of DNA is supposedly 455 exabytes of data.
- dekhn 3y agoHere, let's do some math. let's treat a base pair as 2 bits of data (4 bases, 2 bits to encode a base). The average molecular weight of a DNA base pair is twice this, approximately 660 daltons (or 660 grams/mole). So a gram of DNA is 1/660 moles, or 6.023 * 10 * 23 / 660, which means a gram of DNA is 9 * 10 * 20 base pairs, making 1.8 * 10 * 21 bits, which is around 900 exabytes which is very close to a factor of two from your estimate. (also, in case it comes in handy: pure water is 55Molar)
- pama 3y agoThanks for the neat estimate. It would be hard to dehydrate DNA to a significant degree, so adding some water and counterions would probably reduce your estimate by a bit. (Error correction would also reduce things by a bit.) Overall the estimate of ~500 exabytes per gram seems reasonable to me.
- dekhn 3y agoI think there are worse ideas than cloning your data into a population of tardigrades using an error-correcting code, and then dehydrating them into the tun state. Not nearly the density of raw dry DNA (which itself can be stabilized using trehalose or PVA) but tardigrade tuns can resist harsh environments for ~millenia.
- pama 3y agoAgreed. I hope there will be commercial scale inexpensive solutions of this type in the next ten years.