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Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria

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Re: Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria

#11
post #2

I don't know enough about biology to comment on their storage-density claims, but as to the encryption, I'm getting a strong whiff of snake oil from "only the client would know the function to derive the checksum". If you want to convince me that bioinformatics has something to offer cryptology, then you need to explain to me what property wetware has that silicon doesn't which causes it to be unlike a classical Turi…

The mass of a single base pair is about 1.08E-21 grams. That's 1.85E10^21 bits[1] of information in a single gram of purified DNA, about a forth of a zettabyte. So, if they're using DNA as the storage mechanism (the slideshow linked in the article indicates that they are), then 90GB is pretty insignificant. Sure, the bacteria will all be pretty filled with DNA, but it's not especially outlandish. Throwing compression at the information (as the slideshow discusses) makes it even less outlandish.

[1] Each base pair encodes two bits, as DNA and RNA is basically a base-four sequence (when we're thinking about it as data storage).

Re: Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria

#13

Also interesting: they contributed their technique to the BioBricks Foundation: http://bbf.openwetware.org Very exciting things coming as we get the protein expression laws down well. I can't wait to use http://mrgene.com to sequence DNA and a BioBrick Assembly kit to put it all together. http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE0546.asp

For those who would like to watch a great talk, Learning to Program DNA, by Dr. Drew Endy (one of the main guys behind BioBricks)[1] at UW: http://uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rid=25856

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Endy

Re: Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria

#18

Don't bacteria die, reproduce, and mutate? How is it possible to store anything long term in room temperature conditions?

it's possible, they have pretty spectacular error correction mechanisms. Just don't blast it with UV.

There are two problems with bacterial data storage. The first is information retrieval. Running a sequencer is no fun.

The second problem is genetic recombination, which is what they are using to 'achieve encryption'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_recombination

Of course, there's going to be some toxic DNA sitting in the sequences they are making, and it will be to the advantage of the bacteria to spit it out, they will find a way to do it with recombinases, even the ones with the most pernicious recombinase (recA) knocked out.

Re: Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria

#19

Also interesting: they contributed their technique to the BioBricks Foundation: http://bbf.openwetware.org Very exciting things coming as we get the protein expression laws down well. I can't wait to use http://mrgene.com to sequence DNA and a BioBrick Assembly kit to put it all together. http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE0546.asp

Biobricks are going to die. Restrtiction digest/ligation is too much of a pain in the butt. I've been in professional labs where it takes upwards of 8 tries to get ligation products in. People are going to move to Gibson Assembly. If you're interested in DIY bio, Gibson Assembly is the way to go.

Obligatory awful youtube video that does a bad job of explaining Gibson Assembly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCWjJFU1be8

Re: Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria

#20
post #3

My anti-virus software just deleted all my data!

You mean your antibacterial salve did! Don't let people with a bandaid on their hand work on your computer, they might just have Neosporin in there!

Hehe, sorry, that was silly of me.
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