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Microsoft Boots Up the First 'DNA Drive' For Storing Data (technologyreview.com)
Since 2016, Microsoft has been working with the University of Washington to develop the first device to automatically encode digital information into DNA and back to bits again. "So far, DNA storage has been carried out by hand in the lab," reports MIT Technology Review. But now Microsoft and researchers at the University of Washington "say they created a machine that converts electronic bits to DNA and back without a person involved." From the report: The gadget, made from about $10,000 in parts, uses glass bottles of chemicals to build DNA strands, and a tiny sequencing machine from Oxford Nanopore to read them out again. According to a publication on March 21 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the team was able to store and retrieve just a single word -- "hello" -- or five bytes of data. What's more, the process took 21 hours, mostly because of the slow chemical reactions involved in writing DNA. While the team considered that a success for their prototype, a commercially useful DNA storage system would have to store data millions of times faster.
I say, I store data in my pee pee. It's a b*tch to keep it from coming out in the bathroom. People say lots of things.
Microsoft has been working toward a photocopier-size device that would replace data centers by storing files, movies, and documents in DNA strands, which can pack in information at mind-boggling density.
Sometimes, we are led to believe that advancements in technology do not stem from advancements in private industry, and that too large corporations are always working to the detriment of humankind.
Not always, certainly, but occasionally, the needs of civilization and corporate well being collide.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If you store the correct data, it could literally be a virus.
Um, no. Viruses use RNA, not DNA.
Uhm, no, smallpox, herpes, and chickenpox are all DNA viruses.
Another worrisome aspect is sanitizing your data: Bacteria have genes for "eating" DNA when other sources of energy aren't around.
This means an errant E. coli could find its way in, eat most of the data and replicate, and now there's also host-machinery for your RNA-virus to infect.
So, how many base pairs per second are we talking here?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is an excellent question! In principle any (hetero)polymer would work.
For context, in the short term we're targeting archival storage and not high speed storage (it'll probably never be low latency in the same way an SRAM is). The amazing thing about DNA is that it's not only long lived under reasonable storage conditions but also eternally relevant. Try reading a 30 year old 8" floppy today. The data may still be okay but you'll have trouble finding the hardware. Since DNA is so important to humans in other contexts (medicine), we can be fairly certain that DNA reading (sequencing) will be easy and available in 30 years, or 300, or 3000.
DNA is also much easier to manipulate. Nature provides us with all the tools (enzymes) we need to copy and select specific sequences. Academia provides us with a better understanding of DNA than other polymers. And industry provides us with wonderful machines like high throughput DNA sequencers. Watson-Crick base paring also allows DNA to do computation, which in some cases can be done directly on the data encoding DNA.
As for safety, you are right in that many microbes are quite good at finding and incorporating DNA but such an even would still be quite rare and there are many things to consider:
1) DNA data payloads are stored as just DNA, typically frozen or dried. And DNA alone is not sufficient to be pathogenic.
2) Generally when scientists store data in DNA right now it's encrypted first. This make it hard to pick out payload data that will encode for something specific.
3) It's far easier for a malicious person to just get parts of genes synthesized from different vendors and stitch them together at home. That ship has already sailed.
4) Currently the best way to synthesize the data payloads is in short sequences of DNA that aren't long enough to encode for anything but short peptides.
5) Randomly coming across a working pathogenic DNA sequence is technically possible but practically impossible (much like it's possible that you'll spontaneously quantum tunnel to the center of the earth but that'll never actually happen). An average gene in e. coli is about 8000 bases long. Of that size alone there are 4^(8000) (a beyond astronomically large number) of DNA sequences and only a handful of those do anything at all. Of those most would be toxic to the microbe it self or be a useless metabolic load (proteins are expensive to make and useless genes get cut out or turned off VERY fast in a population---days in continuous culture).
6) If desired, you can also trade off a little density to insert stop codons occasionally, limiting the size of anything translated to only a few amino acids.
Actually I think that millions of times faster statement in the summary came from a misquote or misunderstanding. For archival storage(write once read VERY seldom). It should have been millions (or trillions really) more bytes. 20 hours to write an archive and 1 hour to read it isn't bad. I believe amazon glacier has a similar read latency.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Because contrary to the science that has already been done (cited above), and that this hardware and a little extra labware would enable, making your own "Very VERY special micro brew" is totally impossible!
YES, IMPOSSIBLE! /s
Overrated my ass.
Why would we want to do this? What makes dna data storage worthwhile?
Love sees no species.
So, after a few centuries, instead of degrading, the data itself will evolve. "hello" will become "hi".
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Is going to come from this.
Some error is going to happen, the coping will go out of control, teh tech that come to take a look will get infected and spread that all around.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
it takes all kinds, in NY city
Wonder what I will play it on?