<
https://www.science.org/content/article/dna-printing-press-could-quickly-store-mountains-data>
"The invention of the printing press and movable type—metal letters that can be
arranged and inked—led to the Renaissance and an explosion of information that
continues to this day. Now, researchers report applying the concept of movable
type at the molecular level to dramatically speed up the ability to encode data
in strands of DNA, an incredibly high-density medium for storing information.
Although only demonstrated in the lab so far, the new approach, reported today
in
Nature, could energize the emerging DNA data storage industry by making it
cost effective to archive vital information for decades and beyond, independent
researchers say.
“It’s a really nice proof of concept and a significant improvement over
previous DNA data storage approaches,” says Kun Zhang, a genomics expert at
Altos Labs. “It gets around a barrier of DNA data storage that requires
synthesizing DNA from scratch,” adds Jeff Nivala, a biophysicist at the
University of Washington.
The allure of DNA data storage is immense: A single gram of DNA can store up to
215 petabytes of data, enough to store 10 million hours of high-definition
video. At that rate, a few pickup trucks worth of DNA could store all the data
humanity has ever recorded. And unlike conventional electronic hard drives,
which degrade in years or decades, DNA can last for millennia.
Moreover, reading out data encoded in DNA’s four-letter alphabet is
straightforward and relatively fast these days with DNA sequencing machines.
The problem is writing the data, which typically requires synthesizing custom
strands of DNA one letter at a time. Today’s fastest DNA writers can synthesize
about 320 million bytes of DNA data per day. At this speed, writing a single
gram’s worth of DNA would take nearly 2 million years. “It’s unaffordable
compared to hard drives because the writing speed is quite slow,” says Long
Qian, a computational biologist at Peking University.
To speed things up, Qian and her colleagues sought inspiration from movable
type, originally invented in China around 1040 C.E., some 400 years before
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, using porcelain instead of metal. To serve
as the “paper,” they synthesized long standardized, template pieces of
single-stranded DNA. For the “type,” they synthesized hundreds of short
single-stranded DNA “bricks,” each 24 bases long, with a sequence designed to
bind to a specific region along the DNA template."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/276-regenerative-city/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
