The hype surrounding this, like the “dna computing” hype is so large as to be palpable. No one can make DNA at the petabase scale in a controlled way, and there are not even good ideas on how to go about it in principle. DNA can be copied relatively easily, but construction of new sequence is very hard, slow, costly, and error-prone. Reading is also slow and costly. It is true that DNA is probably a very good way to store information for a long time, especially if encoded in a living system, where accurate replication and correction of errors is automated.
On Mar 3, 2017, at 11:53 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
FYI --
"215 petabytes per gram of DNA"
[This just in: NSA puts gigantic Bluffdale facility back onto the real estate market.]
(paywalled)
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950
DNA Fountain enables a robust and efficient storage architecture
Yaniv Erlich, Dina Zielinski1
Science 03 Mar 2017: Vol. 355, Issue 6328, pp. 950-954 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaj2038
A reliable and efficient DNA storage architecture
DNA has the potential to provide large-capacity information storage. However, current methods have only been able to use a fraction of the theoretical maximum. Erlich and Zielinski present a method, DNA Fountain, which approaches the theoretical maximum for information stored per nucleotide. They demonstrated efficient encoding of informationincluding a full computer operating systeminto DNA that could be retrieved at scale after multiple rounds of polymerase chain reaction.
Abstract
DNA is an attractive medium to store digital information. Here we report a storage strategy, called DNA Fountain, that is highly robust and approaches the information capacity per nucleotide. Using our approach, we stored a full computer operating system, movie, and other files with a total of 2.14 × 106 bytes in DNA oligonucleotides and perfectly retrieved the information from a sequencing coverage equivalent to a single tile of Illumina sequencing. We also tested a process that can allow 2.18 × 1015 retrievals using the original DNA sample and were able to perfectly decode the data. Finally, we explored the limit of our architecture in terms of bytes per molecule and obtained a perfect retrieval from a density of 215 petabytes per gram of DNA, orders of magnitude higher than previous reports.
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