
DNA Fountain – Capacity-approaching DNA storage - pizza
http://dnafountain.teamerlich.org/
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corwinbad
Using Twist Bioscience DNA - interesting data points: 215Pb/Gram ~1,300 copies
per unique oligo enough to get a 100% data back Almost unlimited coping of
recoverable data using PCR

Now only need to increase the throughput and price of DNA synthesis by 4-6
orders of magnitude

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jlj
What possibilities are opened up when 215Pb/Gram with good I/O and price is
reality?

With computing power increasing 1 order of magnitude around every 5 years
(Moore's law), this might be reality by 2027.

An antecedental story is computer graphics, it only took 20 years for to go
from idea to reality. Learned a lot listening to a talk at work by Alvy Ray
Smith a couple years back. The true poineers are building now not for what is
possible now but for what will be possible tomorrow. This article gives some
context
[https://www.forbes.com/asap/2001/0528/052.html](https://www.forbes.com/asap/2001/0528/052.html)

This is another interesting perspective on time scale of orders of magnitude
of computing power
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orde...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders_of_magnitude)

~~~
gwern
> What possibilities are opened up when 215Pb/Gram with good I/O and price is
> reality?

The data storage is almost totally irrelevant. When you improve DNA synthesis
by 3-4 orders of magnitude, you make it dirt-cheap to synthesize whole custom
genomes, hyper-optimized for anything you wish. (Currently, the state of the
art is synthesizing an E coli genome takes multiple years and a large
international collaboration.) CRISPR only lets you do a few edits at a time at
most, in some parts of the genome; imagine being able to do tens of thousands
of edits as easily as 1 edit. At that point, you're hardly even 'editing',
you're designing organisms as a whole. The Church lab has some astounding
proposals for things you can do when you are able to synthesize a whole
genome, like cleaning out all the retrovirals, movable elements, recoding the
genome for total viral immunity, on top of the obvious stuff like eliminating
all mutation load or increasing specific traits by dozens or hundreds of
standard deviations. The mind boggles.

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jgill4
Craig Venter, Clyde Hutchison and Daniel Gibson produced a minimal genome in a
relatively short period of time and even transplanted it. This was a "bottom
up" approach in which all of the DNA was synthetic. This is a trivial thing
for this team now. As you mentioned, when synthesis costs drop dramatically,
things will get interesting!

