Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum DNA for Dense Storage

Just how might you record the written word for posterity?

No point in stone chiselled Hieroglyphics, it might last for ten thousand years, but no information
No point in using a wax cylinder, they went out with
Edison
No point in using a wire recorder, that went out before
you were born.
The same with tape recorders.
No point in using 78 phonograph records, or even 45's or
33 1/3, they became obsolete in your teenage years.
How about CD's, DVD's, and Blue ray...Well yes the storage
density is going up all the time, but even DVD's have
only got a guaranteed limited shelf life of approx 50 years, thats if you still have the equipment, and someone
around who knows how to play them back.
What about GigaByte Memory sticks.....better.
Wrapped them in lead foil against cosmic ray bombardment, and keep them cold, they might last a couple of hundred years (my guesstimate) before metal wiskers and substrate deteriation sets in.And you will still need the Audio visual 'puter equipment to be able to play the info back.

So could it ever be possible to store the worlds information, for not thousands of years, but Millennia, and read it back?I'm talking forever here.

Storage forever? Yes, and here is the man who believes he
can do it.
His name is George E. Church, an American Professor of
Molecular Genetics. A pioneer in Synthetic Biology, and
Synthetic Life, friend of Craig Venter.

Just this May, Venter and Church successfully inserted a fully
customized strand of DNA into a living cell, creating what
they call the "first synthetic genome."

Church says he will soon be able to create synthetic meat to feed the starving millions, grow waterproof cotton and produce bananas that stay ripe for months without rotting.

And if you think producing synthetic food for millions is
wonderful, how about this.

He has produced a book that has archived
all its 53,426 words in DNA, which has just passed a proof
of concept test.....No its not the Classic book 'Moby
Dick', but it could have been.
This book was encoded in DNA stored in a test tube, and
successfully read again afterwards. Reading the book was
slightly more difficult than operating a Kindle e-reader.
This was a book written in oligonucleotides demonstrates, an
in vitro, DNA-based system for archiving and retrieving
information.

DNA is an ideal data storage material. It can be stable
for millennia, even readable when damaged.


Meaning since human DNA has existed unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, probably millions,
George Church he has stored his book virtually forever.
Unlike any other storage material, the equipment for
reading and writing DNA data—polymerases and nucleotides won’t be obsolete anytime soon.

First read all about this Honoured super genius Professor and all his achievements here in Wiki:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Church

...and now read about how he will store information forever:-

http://www.biotechniques.com/news/biotechniquesNews/biotechniques-334090.html

Well, that's not quite true. In fact human DNA is changing all the time. That is how they use DNA to determine relationships among the various ethnic groups, by counting the changes.

That isn't to say the idea is all wrong, it is just that one quote that is wrong. The idea does sound weird, and I'm not sure the idea is all it's cracked up to be, but we can wait and see.

Quick thought, How do you index it? After all a library of all the books in the world is going to need an index.

Bill Gill

I see enough dense storage in humans everyday surely we don't need more :-)

[Quote=Mike Kremer]

Mike Kremer said-Well Bill Gill, it seems easy for you to pick holes in a great mans work.
Professor Geoge Church, has not said that he would be using all of the human DNA chain. You are assuming he was? Bad thinking.
Its more than likely that he would be using a specific part of the DNA chain, many many times over.
I would not presume as to how he impresses data into that part
of the DNA chain. I am not a geneticist, If you can do better and explain what and how, Professor Church imprints data into DNA, please explain.
If not please await Professor Church's further work in this direction.
If you looked at the URL I supplied you might agree that it is somewhat complicated.
I should point out to you that as far as we are aware the basic makeup of DNA, the Double Helix, has remained unchanged here and anywhere else it might be found in the Universe, since Carbon/DNA life came into existence Millions, if not Billions of years ago.

If you check the quote you will see that I was picking on just one sentence. Human DNA has changed dramatically, so that statement is wrong. If the coding he uses in his system is stored so that it won't be disrupted then it might work quite well.

Bill Gill

The downside: "...the new system is not rewritable or searchable"
The upside: "Kosuri estimates that a petabyte of information (1000 terabytes) can be stored in less than 1.5 milligrams of DNA"

Regarding data integrity: The differences in DNA that cause speciation result from replication errors, do they not? If the DNA is to serve as a non-replicating data repository then the only issue would be to protect it from its enviroment. Re the necessary measures, I imagine Prof. Church and his colleagues have a far better idea than we do.

[Quote=Mike Kremer]

Mike Kremer said-" Now thats what I call a jocular quote"

Nice one Orac

[quote=Mike Kremer]
UPDATE on DNA STORAGE

The Method that Professor George Church uses
Leeched from Science Now (AAAS) Aug: 12 2012.

***************************

When it comes to storing information, hard drives don't hold a candle to DNA. Our genetic code packs billions of gigabytes into a single gram. A mere milligram of the molecule could encode the complete text of every book in the Library of Congress and have plenty of room to spare. All of this has been mostly theoretical—until now. In a new study, researchers stored an entire genetics textbook in less than a picogram of DNA—one trillionth of a gram—an advance that could revolutionize our ability to save data.
(information found indirectly though Redewenurs help)

This means that an entire Encyclopedia can be written into the Genomes of living cells.

"Bad move"- says George Church, a Synthetic Biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
"First of all living cells can die, and if you allow them to replicate over many years, they could mutate and change data in time"

Instead Professor Church has created a DNA information-archiving system that uses no cells at all. Instead, an Inkjet printer embeds short fragments of chemically synthesized DNA onto the surface of a tiny glass chip. To encode a digital file, researchers divide it into tiny blocks of data and convert these data not into the 1s and 0s of typical digital storage media, but rather into DNA’s four-letter alphabet of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. Each DNA fragment also contains a digital "barcode" that records its location in the original file. Reading the data requires a DNA sequencer and a computer to reassemble all of the fragments in order and convert them back into digital format. The computer also corrects for errors; each block of data is replicated thousands of times so that any chance glitch can be identified and fixed by comparing it to the other copies.

To demonstrate its system in action, the team used the DNA chips to encode a genetics book co-authored by Church. It worked. After converting the book into DNA and translating it back into digital form, the team’s system had a raw error rate of only two errors per million bits, amounting to a few single-letter typos. That is on par with DVDs and far better than magnetic hard drives. And because of their tiny size, DNA chips are now the storage medium with the highest known information density, the researchers report online today in Science AAA.

****Thoughts
Uses an Inkjet printer !#@!*#!!.....Staggering!!
What can I say..... He's got to get a Nobel Prize

Yes, staggering is the word. The encoding - aside from the fact that it's in quaternary, not binary - seems similar to a compressed/zipped computer file. I wonder if the data units could include self-extraction code.

Red you are a sick man that is a cool idea how about we take it a bit further ... bootstrap loader.

Then we can upload, extract and execute whatever we want.

Sick? Hmmm..yep, I'll go with that, ha-ha.