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DNA For Information Processing and Data Storage
Haydn Fenton writes "Here is an article on using DNA for data storage and even information processing. From the article, "The DNA molecule - nature's premier data storage material - may hold the key for the information technology industry as it faces demands for more compact data processing and storage circuitry. A team led by Richard Kiehl, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, has used DNA's ability to assemble itself into predetermined patterns to construct a synthetic DNA scaffolding with regular, closely spaced docking sites that can direct the assembly of circuits for processing or storing data.""
How long until Religious Nuts start claiming to see hidden messages encoded in our DNA telling us to love Jesus?
Or
How long until spies pass messages along in the form of biological matter by sneezing into a tissue?
Or
How long until we can buy books in readable vials full of liquid?
The possibilites are endless and cool but of course it will probably just be used to sell us Coca Cola... so much wasted potential.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
I remember hearing about this originally nearly 10 years ago now. I remember bringing it up in a discussion on Usenet, engendering many "It will never happen" trolls...still seems a few years off though from consumer product?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
While it is self-repairing, changes do occur from time to time during cell division, introducing errors.
A 100th-generation copy of your favorite MP3 may sound as bad as a 100th-generation analog copy. Maybe not quite that bad, but the md5's won't match.
DNA is just a biologic/chemical process of storing info. The smallest bit of information you could reach has already been hypothesized to be an electron...polarize it one way and make it positive (one) and the opposite (zero). Last time I checked electrons are smaller than DNA. But could we go smaller? Quarks? Neutrinos? Photons?...as the smallest components of information?
See here. The data aren't being stored in the DNA, they're being stored in a magnetic layer on top of the DNA. The DNA sequence just drives the granularity of the magnetic layer. (To be precise, all this should be expressed in the future tense but I don't feel like backteracking...)
Disclaimer: IANA[Molecular Biochemist/Geneticist]
I'm not so certain that's something to brag about in this case. DNA may be stable, but DNA replication is not always reliable and accurate. Genetic mutations are common - they are the result of random errors in the replication process. Some organisms have turned really rotten replication accuracy into an advantage (e.g. HIV, which mutates so fast that it has demonstrated an amazing ability to survive everything science has thrown at it). Other organisms do a better job, but never perfectly, as far as I know.
I'm utterly certain the scientists involved know more about DNA than I ever will, so surely they've considered this. I merely wanted to point out that, there are many really cool things that DNA can do, 100% copy accuracy is not one of them.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
[late 70s] that DNA was the only persistent data storage media nature had until we apes invented languages that we could symbolically preserve. All that has essentially progressed, and what has been changing rapidly with advances in biotech, is the speed of data access into DNA. 5 yeas ago, the best guess [and the big money of govt and industry] was that it would take us 10 years to transcribe the human genome...and now thats already done. We are getting faster even faster than we expected. [that technological acceleration could be partly attributed to the open exchange of techniques and discovered sequences that the consortium of biochemists had agreed upon at the outset of the project...kind of like developing products in open source]
When that data access speeds up another 8 or 10 orders of magnitude and is both R and W,[and not much sooner!] we can talk about DNA as if it were magnetic media and seriously talk about its applications...Makes you wonder if the lessons of open source are going to have to be rediscoverd as we further exploit what software engineering has to teach us about handling DNA.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
There has been some discussion about using DNA as a massively parallel computer. Suppose you encode data in a DNA sequence (input), then somehow act on it (running a program), and then read the resulting altered DNA. You have a computer, albeit somewhat slow and not terribly practical. Now imagine you start with not one but *billions* of different DNA sequences.You "run" the program over all these inputs simultaneously, and obtain billions of possible outputs. You can then use some chemical tag that binds itself to the 'correct' answer. You now have a massively parallel computer with negligible power consumption in a test tube.
This sort of DNA computer could be useful for a number of problems that involve a lot of trial and error, such as protein folding. In a paper some years ago some scientist managed to solve a traveling salesman problem using one such computer. They generated different strands corresponding to each city, and let them mix in a tube randomly to produce different candidate 'paths'. Then, they used some chemical selector (the tricky part) to eliminate the strands corresponding to invalid paths. Left in the tube were all valid paths, which could then be easily replicated using PCR.
I couldn't find the original paper, but a pretty good explanation can be found here
The solution to such problems is redundancy. One efficient form is padding with extra bits to add error correcting codes.
Science fiction may have an answer too. I believe the Slavers [Niven, Known Space series] engineered giant food animals (with intelligence just because the Slavers were really mean) that had specially engineered DNA so that they would not be impacted by radiation. As you say, mutation is necessary in evolving systems, but if one were engineering a system, you'd want to take that out of the equation.