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Scientists Store Entire Textbook In DNA
sciencehabit writes with this mind-boggling bit from Science Magazine: "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."
nummynuts
I am sorry. I opened Pandora's Box.
Store data in DNA, then figure out a way for our brains to interpret it as knowledge. Imagine being born with the combined understanding of all of the major fields of science, history, languages, crafts, trades, from day one.
But could we make backups? Oh, wait, never mind.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It appears on the surface that the data isn't quickly(sub-ms speeds) stored or recovered. This technology could be very useful for backing up large quantities of data. The real question is how many MB/GB/whatever per second can be read/written to this new "media"?
This sounds familiar... arnt we already doing something similar to this?
In other news, they are now sued for copyright infringment. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Holy cow. Steganography thing is going serious uh? :)
Let me know when we create the perfect being.
Soon, students will be able to claim that their homework ate them!
Man, are the educational publishers going to get cheesed about this.
I wanna see what sorta hideous monster grows out of it!
"I still don't want your DNA anywhere near me, nerd!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Skip the Library of Congress for once. Why not go for a small country, like Wales (no, not Jimmy or his deed). That would be an effort worth bragging about!
... DNA researchers read the DNA and laugh at the primitive textbook
I would think that copying errors and degradation would be a serious issue if attempting to use DNA for arbitrary data storage. In organisms, we can even observe some segments of DNA(like those that code for elements of vital metabolic processes) are highly similar across a broad range of organisms, while non-coding or minimally important regions can vary wildly from individual to individual or even cell to cell; because the penalty for getting them wrong is so low...
Unless the data you are interested in also have, by some impressive coincidence, vital biological importance cruft buildup(or even substantial deletion) could be quite rapid. DNA isn't without self repair mechanisms; but one of the big ones is 'mutants dying' rather than something more elegant.
I've been wondering: is it actually possible to store or protect data in such a way that if such an event occurred, data survives and is recoverable in a useful form? Optical and magnetic media would probably be rendered useless by a large enough solar flare, and storing source code/graphics in paper format would be impractical to recover, so Slashdot, short of building a Faraday cage 100 km below the surface of the Moon, how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?"
So, kactusotp, there you have it: splice it into as many mice / E. coli as needed, release into the wild.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Cool achievement, to be sure, but for data storage? There are a great many ways of achieving ultra high density data storage that have been performed in the lab and are 'only 10 years away'. The trouble always is the engineering: how expensive, how fast, how much, how reliable? One strand isn't too big a deal, but it'll only store maybe 1GB. Now you need thousands of strands and a way to page through them. And maybe a way to seek within them. Etc.
Again, really cool accomplishment, but I can't see it being practical for anything but an organic computer as I have to think organic tech will outpace organic at pretty much every step. (For example, see racetrack memory as a sort of alternative that is already much more viable.)
My dream of becoming Lt. Commander Data has never been closer!
What sort of textbook can you write with nothing but G, A, T, and C?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And just think, all that information that DNA carries on how to grow a human being was created through random chance... O_o
</sarcasm>
The scientists then encoded the Bible in DNA and it produced a cocktail of proteins which had the miraculous effect of curing every organism of all diseases. They then encoded the Koran in DNA, and it produced an abhorrent cocktail of proteins which killed every organism they contacted. When the two were mixed together, they produced an explosion that turned the facility into a crater.
As a biologist, I have thought about this for several years. Seems to me it would also be a great way to send impossible to detect messages. Store your message in DNA form, could even be "encrypted" by using X positions to mean one letter, etc. DNA is very stable, so soak a portion of a piece of clothing or filter or something in the DNA and have your man go about his business. He gets to his end point, tells people where teh DNA is, the do an extraction and sequence it. Rather expensive, but hard to detect.
I can't think of an example from something that everyone should know, but I'll attempt to answer this.
1) There are two tides each day, one when the moon is directly overhead, and one when the moon is directly underneath. Since the gravitational attraction of the moon causes tides, can you explain why there is a tide when the moon is directly underneath?
2) The fourier transform converts from time domain to frequency domain; ie - it takes an audio WAV file of amplitudes over time and converts it to a list of frequencies over time. To do this you multiply by a complex exponential and integrate. Can you explain why this works? In other words, why does multiplying by the exponential and integrating convert from time domain to frequency domain? (Don't look at the answer until you can explain it yourself.)
3) In economics it is well known that a little inflation is good, a lot of inflation is bad, and negative inflation is very bad. Can you tell me what the correct value is? Can you tell me how important it is to hit the correct value exactly (ie - is the good/bad measure relatively flat or sharply peaked)? Can you tell me how to measure inflation in such a way that all economists would agree?
Fundamentalists did the same thing. Here is the decoded version:
G O D . D I D . I T
Table-ized A.I.
What if we wanted to store a creature's genome? Could we store it in DNA? Will it be big enough? How many species' genomes can we store? Oh, wait...
Another great high school excuse bites the dust.
Fovr sc9re+and sexen ypars agz ovr f{theRs bromght fprth *n th2s cont&nent a ne= natin, congeived in lkbprty, and dWdicmted tx the pr;pos|tion thqt alll mvn are creyted equap.
There was a star trek episode where this klingon could inject himself with encoded top secret files. I see reality is catching up with sci-fi
All I can think about is the ST:NG with the creator hologram The Chase
Human engineering is bad not only because of intrinsic moral problems, but also because it would lead to societal catastrophe. Imagine multiple countries engaging in supersoldier arms race.
You are now just getting deleting unneeded files.
XDInd
You code inject secret message into pigeon DNA ...
I think this was a plot of Star Trek TNG episode: some ancient part of our DNA had a message from our long, lost Creators.
Imagine if a page from, say, Going Rogue ended up encoding a protein that was highly toxic to humans and a DNA library containing it accidentally shared some of its corpus with, say, an influenza strain.
Can we use something orthogonal to DNA, please? Something incompatible with our biology.
I'm so glad they didn't store the friggin' bible.
Big Brown Bear?
Encode the data into DNA, then splice the DNA fragment into a self reproducing organism and release into the environment. You end up with trillions of copies of the original data distributed all over the world. (error correction codes would deal with transcription mistakes)
Future generations, even future sentient life forms millions of years later would the be able to decode the data. It would be very obvious as soon as they had sequencing technology: organisms with large parts of their DNA that don't code for anything useful...........
If a gram of DNA can hold a Library of Congress we are going to need a new unit of measure here at database when having storage debates.
Momento Mori
And finally Discovery channel can stop relying on animal sex to sell ratings ...
The **AA execs must be giddy with excitement right now - they can collect royalties every single time a cell divides!
Oh Great....
Now I can't claim to be an expert anymore because all that knowledge, experience and problem solving ability wasn't programmed into my DNA prior to my birth...
Good luck reading it for less than several thousand dollars. And I thought my textbooks were expensive.
Now the TSA is going to have me shit into a bucket, "we have to check if you're smuggling movies in your DNA..."
I know you guys aren't fond of the metric system , but does data have to
be measured in "libraries of Congress" ?
Having never been to said library, this doesn't make much of an impression on me. Any official conversion ratio?
Google claims 1 LoC = 235 TB.
Would this be the start of biological computing? If we could use dna as storage in place of a hard drive... it leads to tons of other projects. Hrm... anyone know what the I/O on something like that would be?
What if they outsource the Editors of this publication to India or Canada?
Will those viruses that edit the DNA replace all the words like "color" and "soccer" with "colour" and "football"?
I'll just get out my laser scalpel and hack away at it ...
Also, does this mean we can get a glow in the dark version of the text just by adding a His-tag green glowy gene like we do in the labs to make cancer surgery easy by docking phosphorescent ligands to rewrite the cancer DNA to glow, allowing us to make sure we got all the cancer just by turning off the lights briefly?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If this carries on, corporate espionage will involve buying drinks for executives and getting a few cells they leave on their wine glass.
Hmmm.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I guess turnabout's fair play. They put a whole genetics textbook into a small amount of DNA. Somehow that seems nobler than the serious error of judgment I committed when I bought my "Victorian Underground Literature" textbook in a used book store. It probably had enough DNA in it to populate a small galaxy.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
If you wrote the book into someone's DNA, you could be the book.
The data was recorded into SYNTHETIC DNA, not the ones produced in nature
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
There is a reason why this little bacterium is nicknamed "Conan": It can withstand cold temperature, strong acid, no water, and INSANELY strong radiation. What is even more amazing is that back in 2003 a group of scientists encoded the song "It's A Small World" into DNA strands, and after 100 generations of replication, the message was found to be perfectly intact. Conan didn't care if it was a song - it reproduced the original strands faithfully without errors.
Combine George Church's work here with Conan, and you got something. It's called the US Government Continuity of Operations Plan.
OP is funny, "they" think that we don't have billions of geebees in our smart phones.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2122
Also, as far as prior art goes, when the New York Times asked a bunch of futurists what they would propose for the time capsule they were building for the year 2000 (this was for the millenial issue), Jaron Lanier (I think) suggested that information be DNA encoded and put into cockroaches. The thinking was that they were indestructible and still be ubiquitous in a thousand years.
No mechanism for preventing copying errors was described though so it would likely be like that game of "telephone" where each person orally conveys to the next a message but many many times (worse). How many cockroach generations would there be in a thousand years? Also the radioactivity from the Armageddon(s) would likely speed up mutations!
And in a related story, the MPAA and RIAA has successfully lobbied Congress to ban any technology that allows copying of the stored information by claiming pirates will use it and ruin their industry. From this day forward it is now illegal to be in possession of RNA or mRNA. All life as we know it is in violation of the law.
Obligatory Dresden Codak link: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/07/12/fabulous-prizes/
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When can I store pr0n in my DNA and recollect them at will?