Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Bacteria Stores Gigs Data.

Every body needs storage space to keep their Data.
Goverments need miles of shelving, to store their DNA Data, plus Research, Chemical and Military information

America, uses over 500 miles of shelving, for information storage.
The UK and France use over 100 miles each.

But now some clever Chinese researchers from Hong Kong, after working for ten years on storage, problems, have recently overcome the practical problems, which had lent weight to sceptics, who previously saw their method of storage as Science Fiction.

Ten years later the Chinese have now learnt how to store the equivalent of hundreds of miles of DATA in a shoebox full of Bacteria, which they keep in a refrigerator.

Wow, read that again.
This 'Science Fiction' method of storage has other advantages, they say. Since their Bacteria constantly reproduce, groups of single celled organisms could store Gigabytes of information for thousands of years.

They also state that their Bacteria storage method is immune to cyber hacking. (Eat your heart out Julian Assange)

****My Thoughts
This is Amazing stuff, but just how they are going to keep their reproducing Bacteria living, and prevent it from poisoning itself, could be a problem.
Should Robots and Bacteria started working together, in a Future World, what chance would we have?

Better let you digest these items, for yourselves.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technolog...145/story.html.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20110109/tsc-hong-kong-researchers-store-data-in-c2ff8aa.html

Not really. Most laboratory strains of bacteria can be frozen, indefinably, in a -80C freezer. Simply add glycerol to the bacterial growth media, to a final concentration of 20%, and freeze. No growth, no metabolism, no issue - and stable for decades.

I'd be more concerned about stability and recovery. These labs stared the data in DNA. Bacterial DNA replicates are not foolproof; in fact they screw up fairly frequently. The very best polymerase we know of screws up about once per 100 million base pairs - for DNA storing binary data that would be equivalent to one screw-up per 200 megs of data; or 3.5 errors per CD's worth of data. And recovery will be both slow and expensive. Conventional DNA sequencing methods can "read" 1000-ish base-pairs at a time. And then you need a primer (what starts the "read") that matches the DNA you just sequenced. Either way you've got a problem - you'll either need to synthesise primers as you sequence DNA, or break your files into individually sequencable chunks and reassemble. Neither of those are easy.

Bryan

Maybe. We already freeze human cells using a chemical called DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide). It acts for our cells like glycerol does for bacteria - it prevents ice crystals from forming and tearing our cells to shreads.

Its doubtful DMSO would work on a intact human (or even whole organs) as its toxic at the levels required for vitrification (freezing without the formation of ice crystals). Groups have developed vitrificants which potentially can be used to freeze humans, but we're a long ways off of being able to do it. The problems are many, both in the freezing and unfreeing side of things:

1) How do you get the vitrificant into all parts of the body without cutting off O2 flow to those organs
2) How do you deal with the ineviditble toxicity of some of the components
3) How do you keep OO2 flowing to the organs while you freeze?
4) How do you repair parts that don't receive enough vitrificant?
5) How do you thaw and get the vitrificant out without killing the patients

The list goes on and on...

There is also some new evidence from neurobiology that the whole process ma be impossible, at least if you want to retain memories. It appears that the keeping of memories is a dynamic process; i.e. they're maintained by continual interactions between nerves. Its unclear at this point if freezing would stop those from occuring.


Some animals have "antifreeze" genes which allow them to survive freezing. This usually requires three features; an antifreeze to prevent ice from forming, a way of regulating metabolism to reduce energy requirements, and a way of maintaining minimal metabolism while "frozen".

Some frogs have this abilities, as do some fish. But they do not "freeze" in the conventional sense; instead their body temps drop below 0C; their hearts still beat, brains still work, etc, thoughbeit at a very low rate.

This "suspended hibernation" may be possible in humans. Hydrogen sulphide can induce a state similar to what is seen in frogs and fish, and mice have been "frozen" to 6C in this manner and recovered without apparent effect. I *think* this H2S-induced hibernation is currently in a phase I trial with humans, although I couldn't find a citation to prove that. I'd point out though, that the goal of this isn't for longevity, but rather is for keeping critically ill patients alive during ambulance transfers, etc.

Bryan