DNA Data Storage Is Closer Than You Think | Hacker News Reader

DNA Data Storage Is Closer Than You Think

scientificamerican.com

29 pointsevo_913 comments

It's fun to think about our DNA already being used for storage...the storage of the various attributes defining a reproductively-successful organism. The data being stored is an amalgamation of billions of years of environmental knowledge going back in lineage to the first cells on earth (presumably).

I read a very similar article touting this technology 20 years ago. It was in the research phase then, and it still seems to be in the research stage now, with no DNA storage devices available on the consumer market yet or any time soon.

I'd love to see this tech become a reality, but right now outside of the laboratory it seems to be all hype.

Isn't glass storage closer to the masses and already in use?

https://www.disclose.tv/these-5d-glass-discs-store-360-tb-of...

Do you actually know how long it lasts? What if it lasts only 100 years? With DNA we know the lasting period very well because of carcasses and corpses that died thousands of years ago and whose DNA we were able to sequence.

you’re making the assumption we’ll use the same type of DNA and that this will work in exactly the same way. pretty powerful assumption

Well, it’s impossible to have it both ways. If you want the already validated approach then you’ll have to stick with DNA and not some variant structures.

It’s a decent point, however, that if this tech takes off, there may be innovations in storage molecules to improve read/write speed, density, etc.

DNA's half-life is actually around 500 years. A major issue with ancient DNA samples is degradation. We have techniques for working around this, but part of that relies on knowing the underlying genome that we are sequencing (since we care about variation from that reference genome).

This is a very interesting use case by the trip-hop band Massive Attack, by storing their 20th anniversary re-issue of Mezzanine in DNA 'spray'.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/massive-attack-mezzanine-dna...

If I can store data in DNA, can I use yeast for genetic algorithms?

The signal:noise:cost function is prohibitively high.

You'd have to figure out how to encode the fitness function into the DNA/environment. We're only scratching the surface of how DNA works in its entirety and are likely decades away from being able to "compile to DNA."

The genetic variability available to the organism can be treated as normalization / quantization of abstract encoding. Map your desired results to this abstract "latent space" and start breeding yeasts. Build environment with various factors' parameters controlled by actuators attached to computer doing ML, maybe even GAs. The environment is the function!

"we are about to have a serious data-storage problem" is a bit hyperbolic but the technology is very real and being actively developed by a few different orgs.

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