Using Bacterial DNA For Data Storage

NPV writes "January ACM Communications has an article on the use of DNA in genetically modified bacteria to store information. This is an attempt to achieve the ultimate in archival storage (one of the modified bacteria can tolerate 1000X more radiation than a human being). Now just suppose that the "junk DNA" in the human genome is the documentation package for the machine code. Who wrote that manual?" Here's the article abstract.

Comments

There is a kind of bactera

[autopr0n]

That keeps four copies of it's DNA in rings and error checks constantly. They're probably using one of these, as it happens to be very radiation resistant, I'm guessing they used these, and so the mutation rate would be very, very low. So it wouldn't keep forever, but would for a very long time.

You could also put error checking (parity, checksums, etc) so once you found some bactera you could check to make sure they had the right version and not a mutation

Re:Of course its junk DNA...

[0x0d0a]

To be entirely fair, they were using a brute force mechanism and dealing with a changing, hostile environment. We can use a controlled environment.

Yet I don't see this hitting the market in the next ten years.

I remember about eight years ago an article about how the future of storage was going to be in a frozen solid containing bacteria that change shape when a certain intensity of light hits them -- two lasers, each with half the requisite amount of light, would shine in to cause the bacteria to change shape where they met. Terrabytes in a little cube. Never happened.