Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I really liked their paper. Its a bit less over the top than the extremetech guys but hey, that is the difference between pop journalism and science.

Clearly with some form of fountain code or LDPC codes you will be able to get the data back, but what struck me is that I always thought of DNA as relatively unstable, in the sense that cells decay/die etc, but the fact that just sitting there, DNA which isn't expressing various proteins under the influence of other cellular mechanisms, well it just sits there. That was new for me.

When I showed it to my wife she pointed out that the sourdough starter she has been using since we were married was from her grandmother, I joked that the next megaupload type raid would have to sequence all the DNA the found in a place to figure out if Shrek3 was encoded in it somewhere. That would be painfully funny I think.

well the dna we used never touched the inside of a cell; plain dried dna is very stable, evidenced by the ability to sequence 10's of thousands of years old samples stored in decaying flesh (albeit with some errors).

A bit of support to that: it used to be common to send plasmids (circular strand of DNA) to people on paper. You'd take a drop of the plasmid, put it onto the paper, and let it dry. When the recipient got the card in the mail, they'd cut out around your dried plasmid and put it back into water. It would be perfectly functional, if needed.

If you needed more, you could then transform E. coli with the plasmid and let them do the work for you.

I don't know if this is done very much anymore, but this helps to show just how robust DNA can be. I want to say that a few years ago, someone tried to sell our lab an archival tool for DNA that was essentially this. You dried your DNA samples onto blotting paper in a grid, then when you needed a sample, you could go back and reconstitute by punching it out of the paper.

Plasmids are still commonly sent in the mail dried on paper. At least they were when I dropped out of my Ph.D. program a few years ago.

do you have a link to their paper?

I posted our paper on dropbox (until i get into too much trouble over it): paper http://db.tt/ZDoDJZeD supplement http://db.tt/elIqsy72

thank you!

If you are a AAAS member: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/08/15/science.1... (which is where I got it)

I don't know if there is a copy outside the Science Paywall, perhaps Sriram could answer that.

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