Live data from Hacker News

Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

extremetech.com

21–30 of 133 posts

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#21
post #16

Can we encode all of human knowledge into the DNA of some organism? How can organisms access data stored in their DNA? Imagine being born with knowledge of every Wikipedia article, or even every website. What would that be like?

Education would no longer be necessary or valued. Experience and creativity would be what everyone garners to get a job.

You may be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#22
post #16

Can we encode all of human knowledge into the DNA of some organism? How can organisms access data stored in their DNA? Imagine being born with knowledge of every Wikipedia article, or even every website. What would that be like?

Education would no longer be necessary or valued. Experience and creativity would be what everyone garners to get a job.

I think we'd be past "jobs" if it were possible to store and read memory in DNA with the human brain.

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#23
post #16

Can we encode all of human knowledge into the DNA of some organism? How can organisms access data stored in their DNA? Imagine being born with knowledge of every Wikipedia article, or even every website. What would that be like?

Education would no longer be necessary or valued. Experience and creativity would be what everyone garners to get a job.

At the point where we'd engaged in massive-scale genetic engineering to insert knowledge into our DNA chain, jobs may no longer be the significant driving force of our lives. Or, at least, I'd like to hope that we'd have been able to move beyond them.

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#25

To read the data out are they basically doing de novo assembly on the sequenced reads? How are they handling all of the errors in gene sequencing? How about assembly errors? Long repeats?

If your strand length is less than or equal to the read length of your sequencer, and you have the address blocks at the start of every sequence, you don't really need to worry about assembly. Read depth and/or a checksum of some kind will take care of errors in sequencing, and with short strands or compression of some kind, long repeats aren't much of a problem either.

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#26
post #15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ribosomes seem to manage just fine. :) You just encode a big marker (making sure it's not a palindrome-paired version of itself!) as a header. If you see that, it's a correct order. If not, it's not.

This header idea is great because then you only need to keep one strand and can toss the other, potentially quadrupling the amount of data storage (I'm assuming you can keep single strands of DNA stable). [Left strand] A = 00 T = 01 C = 10 G = 11 [Right strand] T = 00 A = 01 G = 10 C = 11 Anyone know these guys at Harvard, b/c this might be a way to put, at most, 2800 terabytes in a gram? (I don't know how long the h…

I suspect that George's lab used a sensible encoding scheme. They're fairly sharp.

I can't find a copy of the original article, but it's certainly more informative than some science journalism fluff piece.

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#27

To read the data out are they basically doing de novo assembly on the sequenced reads? How are they handling all of the errors in gene sequencing? How about assembly errors? Long repeats?

If your strand length is less than or equal to the read length of your sequencer, and you have the address blocks at the start of every sequence, you don't really need to worry about assembly. Read depth and/or a checksum of some kind will take care of errors in sequencing, and with short strands or compression of some kind, long repeats aren't much of a problem either.

Thanks, that makes sense. But how to you get the address block at the start of each sequence?

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#28
post #16

Can we encode all of human knowledge into the DNA of some organism? How can organisms access data stored in their DNA? Imagine being born with knowledge of every Wikipedia article, or even every website. What would that be like?

I think you're misunderstanding things a bit. In the context of DNA as a data storage medium, it no longer functions as a "building block of life". It'd be like taking some binary image data and overwriting it with binary audio data. You can still technically interpret it as image data, but it's just going to be a random jumbled mess, and will probably error out immediately.

Re: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

#29
post #26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This header idea is great because then you only need to keep one strand and can toss the other, potentially quadrupling the amount of data storage (I'm assuming you can keep single strands of DNA stable). [Left strand] A = 00 T = 01 C = 10 G = 11 [Right strand] T = 00 A = 01 G = 10 C = 11 Anyone know these guys at Harvard, b/c this might be a way to put, at most, 2800 terabytes in a gram? (I don't know how long the h…

I suspect that George's lab used a sensible encoding scheme. They're fairly sharp. I can't find a copy of the original article, but it's certainly more informative than some science journalism fluff piece.

They might not have used a "coding" scheme at all, if they were interested in characterizing the frequency and types of errors.
Post reply on HN