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How DNA could store all the world’s data

nature.com

1–10 of 27 posts

Re: How DNA could store all the world’s data

#4
> The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you could.”

how does this work? are the mistakes consistent enough that we can design encodings that rely upon them?

Re: How DNA could store all the world’s data

#5

> The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you…

FEC (0) basically adds extra information that can be used to fix errors. A simple scheme is to just duplicate all the info (like a backup), but there are much more clever schemes which are much more efficient.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction

Re: How DNA could store all the world’s data

#6

> The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you…

Check the "making memories" infographic midway down the article. One part is that they transcribe the data four times, another is that they only use three of four bases at a certain point. There's probably more checksums though.

Re: How DNA could store all the world’s data

#9
post #7

Even if you can make it work, DNA stability is poor. I don't see why you wouldn't use a higher fidelity atomic storage solution.

DNA stability is quite high. To the point where there is actually a movement to get scientists to stop freezing DNA for long term storage because it uses large amounts of energy for no reason.

Re: How DNA could store all the world’s data

#10
post #8

Do we need to keep the DNA away from bacteria? Would it not be digested for nutrients or food? Or is that just propaganda from the salesman pushing memory carbon for my looongterm data storage needs?

DNAse contamination would be a big problem too. It would also be a relatively easy way to "securely" erase your data.
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