10 ms·
Harvard stores 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA (2012)
- mariusz79 12y agoThe era of sexually transmitted data is upon us. :]
- matthewmcg 12y agoHaving multiple partners is not a backup method!
- thanksgiving 12y agoRedundant array of inexpensive di?ks =)
- swalsh 12y agoWhat would be great is each time you copy that data, it mutated a bit... and if the mutation was positive, you could copy it again.
- spacemanmatt 12y agoI see what you did there, with that...
- rasur 12y agoInsert Obligatory 'Diamond Age' reference here. EDIT: Yes well for those who haven't read the book the reference is to the sexual transmission of data. Implied (but not confirmed) by nano-tech, however no implementation details were provided (as I recall), so encoded DNA might have been a possibility as a medium. Just sayin'.. /shrugs/
- Lexarius 12y agoJust imagine the sexually transmitted advertisements. Get a strange rash for a few days that has an ad for condoms printed on it.
- iMark 12y agoSo, what's the latency?
- aceperry 12y agoAnd gets sued by the patent holders of the DNA code!
- matthewrhoden1 12y agoMy first thought was, how long did it take to write and read this data? I don't expect exceptional speed, but I do wonder about throughput and seeking.
- boomzilla 12y agoFTA: 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. OK, so assuming 1 hour for 3 billion bases, it's 1000 hours for 3 trillions bases (3 Terabits) or 1 million hours for ~3 petabits (or 400TBs of data). Yeah, that's a long time, roughly 100 years :)
- aethertap 12y agoIt should be highly parallelizable though, so all hope is not lost.
- laxatives 12y agoI believe that also consumes the strands you're reading, so unless the source is copied many times, it is probably even slower than that.
- andrewstuart2 12y agoGood thing cells have been copying DNA since life began.
- schrodinger 12y agoGreat, now my hard drive is going to get cancer!
- andrewstuart2 12y agoAt least you can remove/destroy the cells though. Aside from DNA storage & replication, there's no auxiliary purpose of the tissue. http://xkcd.com/1217/ http://xkcd.com/1217/
- skywhopper 12y agoMy quibble is with the claim that 3TB (3.5") hard drives are the "densest storage medium in use today". Yes, the article is two and a half years old, but by then 32GB MicroSD cards had been around for a couple of years. 100 such cards would exceed the capacity of a 3TB hard drive and weigh a tenth as much.
- tlrobinson 12y agoAlso I'm pretty sure there are magnetic tape drives that have higher density (but of course extremely high latency)
- FrankenPC 12y agoCombine that with new 3D stacking technology and solid state storage takes a huge leap forward.
- skosuri 12y agoYeah, the article isn't great. We go through how we calculated densities; we didn't use hard drive enclosures, but did include thickness for HD platters in calculating density. In general, magnetic tape mostly wins as they are so thin.
- ikeboy 12y agoSomeone remind me why this isn't in our hard drives yet.
- cek 12y agoBecause it's slow.
- ikeboy 12y agoHow slow? And why can't it be used for archiving purposes or something that doesn't need high-speed access?
- RIMR 12y agoBecause this is a discovery, not an invention. If they could make high-performance biological storage devices the size of hard drives, you don't think they would be doing this already? This probably required a machine significantly larger than most desktop computers, with a pricetag in the $100,000+ range. That and it has a R/W speed of ~30Kb/s... It will be in our hard drives when the technology has been developed to make that happen. I mean, graphene is already looking to be a far more efficient and powerful alternative to silicon. Why isn't that in our processors yet? It's because creating a logic gate and creating an x86 CPU are entirely different things. The same way that encoding a bunch of data into DNA and replicating it a few billion times is entirely different from making an on-demand biological data storage device.
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- mschuster91 12y agoHow robust is DNA against natural or artificial radiation?
- kyzyl 12y agoA question that's somewhat akin to asking, 'How robust are humans to flying projectiles?' ;-) Of course, it's all about the energy. I'm not a biologist, so I won't speak to the details of how resilient DNA is to specific types of exposure or why, but I am a physicist and I can tell you that if you blast DNA with high energy radiation, like gamma rays, it's gonna have a bad time. That said, if we want to talk about robustness in terms of what it's likely to be exposed to, then it's pretty darn robust. We are exposed to a wide band of EM radiation on a constant basis, and can even withstand exposures on the higher end without becoming 'corrupted'. I'd also note that standard, non-specially designed electronics aren't very resilient to radiation either. Not to mention, if you could reliably read/write data using DNA, I'd expect that redundancy would become... easy. Security on the other hand...
- Zancarius 12y ago> Security on the other hand... Sneeze once and everyone has a copy? :)
- jorjordandan 12y agoIt's weird when you read about tech advances that are so profound, you have to stop and consider the philosophical implications. I have a dime on my desk that probably weighs 2 grams... something that small could contain more raw data than a person could possibly read in their entire life... that could contain 1.4 million hours of cd quality audio. Insane!
- ikeboy 12y agoWhat does that have to do with philosophy?
- valarauca1 12y agoConsidering and quantifying the some total of your actions in life is largely philosophical in nature. Yes its not writing a paper on the applications of Friedrich Nietzsche in 2015, but everyone also isn't an academic. Much like figuring out how much to tip your waiter is a mathematical exercise. Just one that might not shake the foundations of academic mathematics. Just because territory is well travel, doesn't mean everyone has walked there.
- ikeboy 12y agoBy that definition, everything is philosophy.
- valarauca1 12y ago>everything is philosophy. I know a more then one prof who'd agree with that statement.
- benkillin 12y agohttp://xkcd.com/903/ http://xkcd.com/903/ "Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at 'Philosophy'."
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- logicallee 12y agoParticularly impressive when you consider the human genome is only ~700 MB.[1] So this is like a million times as much data as human DNA stores, but in the same DNA format. Impressive. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-memory-would-be-required-to-store-human-dna http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-memory-w...
- slayed0 12y agoIf they have possible values: TGAC, why not convert everything into base4? Wouldn't you get astronomical gains in storage?
- Htsthbjig 12y agoI wondered the same question.
- FrankenPC 12y agoI was wondering the exact same thing. They may already be doing this.
- dzhu 12y agoThey chose to encode one bit per base (rather than two) to give them flexibility in encoding the binary values to avoid particularly tricky sequences for DNA synthesis or sequencing (such as ones that have many repeating bases, e.g. AAAAA, which are known as homopolymers, or ones that have high GC content).
- slayed0 12y agoGreat explanation, thank you
- elmin 12y agoNot astronomical gains. Ignoring the technical challenges of a biological system like DNA, base 4 can encode the same data in exactly half as many characters, so capacity would double.
- v1p1n 12y agothe market for archival storage solutions is getting bigger and bigger... this seems like a great step forward for biological storage.
- html5web 12y agoSoon, we will use our body as storage and eyes as monitors :)
- Terr_ 12y agoWe don't already?
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoI look forward to a portable storage device that has all the books, and all the movies, on a chain around my neck.
- olso 12y agoWhat is the current state of this research (since this article is 2012 material)?
- acadien 12y agoDoesn't DNA have a halflife of like 13 years or something? Wonder what the error rate is on 700TB of DNA just sitting there for a year. I guess you could engineer a system with multiple redundancies and checksums, with that kind of density raid2 or raid1000 doesn't make a difference.
- skosuri 12y agoDepends on how you store it, but if it's dry it's much much longer. e.g., see here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/ab...
- alevskaya 12y agoDNA storage is pretty silly. The claim is 5.5petabits/mm^3 with a 100x redundancy. The problem is that massive storage is only as good as your ability to encode/decode into it. Let's be clear: this work encoded just 5.27 megabits. It's stored in what's basically a large molecular hash table where each piece of key-value data is replicated a million times for redundancy. Each piece then read 100x to correct for the -abundant- errors in each piece. So they encoded less than a megabyte. The problem with encoding information into DNA is that writing serial polymers accurately is difficult and slow. In this paper they're using an inkjet printed DNA array. It takes a day to make them, resulting in a bandwidth of: (5.27 Mbits) / (24x60x60 sec) = 66 bits/sec Reading is a little faster. The fastest system, the HiSeq 2500 reads 120Gbits raw in 27 hours. Factoring in the necessary 100x redundancy, one has a -maximum- read rate of: (120 Gbits / 100) / (27x60x60 sec) = 12 Kbits / sec So for 5.5 petabits it would take 16,000 years to write the data into a cubic mm but only 16 years to read it at the current rate. If we get a little scifi, and assume we build programmable polymerases and get nanopore (direct read) sequencing. Even then, physics limits you to something like 1000 read/writes per sec per pore/polymerase. Instrumenting to these will probably limit per-feature size to being larger than 100micron on a fabricated chip, giving us an ultimate read/write limit around: (2cm/100um)^2 x 1000 bit/sec = 40Mbit/sec for a giant 2cmx2cm chip. With the necessary error-correction and redundancy, it's probably going to cap out around 1Mbit/sec at best. Those 700TB take about 2months to read/write at these rates, and we'll have much-better solid state storage technologies by the time we figure out how to all that with DNA.
- skosuri 12y agoLargely agreed, though I think information storage in sequenced polymers in general is fairly interesting, but we are long ways off. Also, there are applications for DNA storage that are somewhat interesting when weight becomes very important (space travel) or biocompatibility (barcoding food ingredients).
- cft 12y agoThis article is 2 years old. Are there any new developments?
- skosuri 12y agoThis is pretty old, and not sure why it's here again today. That said, I was an author on the paper, and I'm happy to answer questions during a useless meeting I have to attend in 30 minutes.
- acadien 12y agoThe last author too, excellent! What kind of IO bandwidth can you currently get from DNA? Does reading from it damage the DNA? What kind of hurdles need to be overcome to bring this to market and are they hurdles we can overcome in the near future? edit; Hey looks like you answered most of these else where, so thanks.