Tag Archives: Harvard

DNA as a storage device..Capability & Possibility

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Today’s Wall street journal (August 17th 2012) had a very interesting article on future of data storage. Researchers at Harvard University have successfully translated an entire book into actual DNA. The process seems to be very simple and intuitive. The binary codes of the digital book were simply translated into DNA base of A/C or G/T.  According to The WSJ, though the process of DNA sequencing of data is still very expensive, it has dropped from $10,000/million base pair to 10 cents/million base pair.

Harvard is not the only place where this cutting edge DNA storage work is going on. In January 2012, scientist from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and Karlsruhe University in Germany reported creation of storage device using Salmon DNA.

DNA as storing medium has other advantages. First of all from size perspective 1.5 milligram of DNA can store 1 petabyte of data. If we are to compare today’s storage technology with DNA based storage, 1 gm. equivalent of DNA storage would require 333 pounds of current storage medium (1:151000).  The other big advantage is that the genetic material need not be in a solid form. You can have organic matter as liquid that can vastly enhance the way we construct our devices. If we indulge ourselves into a fiction mode, we can visualize these storage devices being implanted in our own brain. After all it is DNA and our brain could possibly read the DNA strings better than flash drives.

I am further looking forward to read the upcoming book by Dr George Church and Ed Rechis titled Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Regenesis-Synthetic-Biology-Reinvent-Ourselves/dp/0465021751.) Dr Church along with Sriram Kosuri at Harvard and Yuan Gao of John Hopkins is leading this initiative.

If not anything, we can certainly predict a Google acquisition of a bioinformatics firm in near future.  This would be too tempting an area for Google to resist.

The WSJ article can be found at

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444233104577593291643488120.html

The original paper was published in the science journal on 16th of Aug. Here is the link for the same (You will need subscription to read it in Science. )

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/08/15/science.1226355