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Scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute are squeezing unparalleled amounts of data in to synthetic DNA, and now they’ve achieved something absolutely amazing: they can store 2.2 petabytes of information in a single gram of DNA, and recover it with 100 per cent accuracy.
The researchers have encoded an MP3 of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, along with all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, into a string of DNA. Scaled up, that represents a storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram. What’s amazing, though, is that they’ve managed to achieve that whilst also implementing error correction in the complex chains of molecules, allowing them to retrieve content with 100 per cent accuracy.
The technique uses the four bases of DNA — A, T, C and G — to achieve the high information density. It is, understandably, still incredibly expensive: creating synthetic DNA and then sequencing it to read off the data is getting far easier, but it’s still a time- and cash-consuming business. Keep hold of your hard drives for now, but DNA could represent a viable storage solution in the future. [Nature via New Scientist]
Image by Tacu Alexei/Shutterstock
Researchers Cram 700 Terabytes of Data Into One Gram of DNA
Insanely Detailed Display Squeezes Over a Million Pixels Into Just 2.3 Inches
I’ll take half a gram please.
Just make sure you don’t store an MP3 of Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani on a piece of DNA and then clone a sheep from it or something.
Wow, imagine that.
This raises all sorts of possible awesomeness. Maybe in the future there’ll be the biological equivalent of the 3D printer, and you can see if any of your data results in a viable living organism…
So does that mean I could buy a Rihanna song on DNA, then grow it into my own personal Rihanna?
At some point somebody is going to run a piece of human dna through their decoding algorithm and discover we are made of porn, petabytes and petabytes of it.
Well we have between 6 and 60 grams (for an avg adult human) of DNA. So that is between 13.2 and 132 petabytes of hardcore midget fisting action.
ok so assuming it’s all at 1080P how many hours/days/months/years of porn are we looking at?
OK so I’m going to be guessing about 700mb per hour. That’s 202,477,029.7 hours or 8436542.9 Days or 1205220.4 weeks or 277181.8 months or 23098.4 years or 2309.8 decades or 231 century’s.
That’s a LOT of hardcore midget fisting action. So you could probably fit the whole of the internet’s porn collection in there?
Probably not as they estimate that 30% of the internet is porn and the internet roughly stands at 1 billion terabytes.
There’s a lot of duplication though. Or so I’m told
sounds like enough then
Anyone know how many 1 Tb hard drives you could produce with 1 gram of magnetic platter coating? or, how much does a single 28nm flash memory cell weigh – how many would you get into a gram?
Need a comparison with other storage technologies to give this figure some meaning/scale…
Also, the DNA may be small but how big are the machines needed to code/uncode the info – or would you have to send the sample off to a lab to get your mp3 back?
makes you wanna know … whats in ours?
see my comment above.
the answer to everything……….
This will make The Jeremy Kyle Show more exciting.
JC: “The DNA results show that he is the father, and he’s also got the entire Steps back catalogue in .FLAC, as well as 200 1080p copies of the Spice Girls Movie stored in his DNA”
Chav Mam: “I want a divorce”
Chav Dad: “I’m so sorry…”
Crowd: “Boo, hiss”
I’m curious as to what that “100%” really means. What’s the error on it? if it was 99.9% accurate that’s still 2 terabytes of corrupt data.
Well it is more like 230 gigabytes.
The way DNA works is that the second something breaks, the DNA repairs itself – the reason we get cancer is that random errors can occur, but the probabilities of these errors occurring is something like 0.00001% – it just happens with us, because we live for so long, and have so many cells.
I don’t know how much you know about DNA but on either side of the double helixes are bases, and each base pairs to an opposite base every time.
Adenine pairs with Thymine
Guanine pairs with Cytosine
So if for some reason, the bond were to break, or a base would be taken away, you would have an unbonded base, and this base would automatically re-pair (and repair) itself with its opposite number (assuming there is an excess of the bases in solution).
The repair is almost instantaneous, thereby meaning that there us very little time for two things to go wrong on the same strand. Although, obviously, it does happen, since 1 in 3 of us will have cancer at some point.
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/illustrations/dnastructure.jpg
This is a good image, showing how the pairing works.