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Need to store 5.5 Petabits long term? Try DNA.

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40hz:
Experiments have been going on for a while to use DNA molecules as a data storage medium. But a Harvard team has recently beat the previous record for storage by successfully storing 5.5 petabits of data (approximately 700 terabytes) in one gram of DNA. Unlike some of the quantum based storage methods currently being researched, DNA storage does not require exotic environments or extreme temperatures to work since DNA is stable at normal room temperatures.

There's a video on Vimeo where the team talks about the project. Link here.

A quick write-up can be found here.

A more technical article is available on the Harvard Medical School website. Link here.

Some interesting highlights about the possibilities of this technology:

And where some experimental media—like quantum holography—require incredibly cold temperatures and tremendous energy, DNA is stable at room temperature. “You can drop it wherever you want, in the desert or your backyard, and it will be there 400,000 years later,” Church said.
 
Reading and writing in DNA is slower than in other media, however, which makes it better suited for archival storage of massive amounts of data, rather than for quick retrieval or data processing. “Imagine that you had really cheap video recorders everywhere,” Church said. “Just paint walls with video recorders. And for the most part they just record and no one ever goes to them. But if something really good or really bad happens you want to go and scrape the wall and see what you got. So something that’s molecular is so much more energy efficient and compact that you can consider applications that were impossible before.”
 
About four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year.
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There's also an interesting note for those who may have ethical or religious concerns about this particular type of project (emphasis added):
 
Although other projects have encoded data in the DNA of living bacteria, the Church team used commercial DNA microchips to create standalone DNA. “We purposefully avoided living cells,” Church said. “In an organism, your message is a tiny fraction of the whole cell, so there’s a lot of wasted space. But more importantly, almost as soon as a DNA goes into a cell, if that DNA doesn’t earn its keep, if it isn’t evolutionarily advantageous, the cell will start mutating it, and eventually the cell will completely delete it.”
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The full research team's report has been published on Science magazine's website (Sorry! $$$ or subscription req.).

Very cool stuff. 8)

f0dder:
Hrm.

Doesn't DNA mutate if it's not part of a cell? And is it more stable than magnetic storage, given the kind environmental exposure it'll undergo (background radiation, whatever)? I guess some of that can be overcome by making a gazillion duplicates of the data, but... sorta seems a bit risky. Probably just my limited knowledge, though :)

Renegade:
Doesn't DNA mutate if it's not part of a cell?
-f0dder (August 22, 2012, 12:18 PM)
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Oh god... Imagine when someone's horror movie collection runs rampant... :D

Edvard:
AFAIK, the artificial DNA they're talking about is XNA, which is man-made polymers rigged to plug in to the same places that the four nucleobases go in regular DNA.  In a cell, there is a constant replicating process going on where mutations are introduced, and current experiments show XNA keeping an average 95-99.6% replication fidelity; excellent for evolution researchers, not so much for storing data.  What I think the article is talking about is using DNA (or rather, XNA) as a static storage medium outside of the squishy environment of constant biological replicating and encoding.  It would then be just encoding and storage, and so mutation (and thus, corruption of the original information) wouldn't happen, or wouldn't happen to the same degree so that you could rely on simple redundancy (beaker full of RAID, anyone?) or some sort of error-correction.

Then again, IANAS either, so my understanding could definitely be as off as yours, possibly more...  ;)

jgpaiva:
Oh, maybe it's this what amazon is using for Amazon Glacier :P

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