Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB

CAMags writes to tell us that a Harvard Professor is claiming to have developed a new variant of a protein called bacteriorhodopsin (bR) that, when layered on a DVD, can store up to 50TB of data. From the article: "The light-activated protein is found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum and is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and color before returning to its 'ground state.'"

Comments

Re:I read this in a science book

[detritus`]

Creating an RNA sequence is not that hard, nor transcribing it to DNA (heck, its just as easy to build the DNA sequence) The problem is building one that's useful, that where the protein folding problem comes in (See folding@home) becuase what the point of having DNA/RNA if the encoded protein is useless?

Re:I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RW

[Phat_Tony]

All organic compounds don't inherently degrade faster than all inorganics. Some are very stable. In fact, there's only one writable digital media I know of that's been certified by The Library Of Congress and other similar associations as an archival storage medium, and it's a CD-R that uses organic phthalocyanine dye. It's made by MAM-A (used to be Mitsui). They used to have a web page up all about it, but I can't find it now, but there is some information provided by resellers, such as inkjetart.com

It's considered to be more time stable than hard drives, conventional mass-produced CD's and DVD's, flash-RAM, and others.