

Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria - jmg
http://2010.igem.org/Team:Hong_Kong-CUHK

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dfranke
I don't know enough about biology to comment on their storage-density claims,
but as to the encryption, I'm getting a strong whiff of snake oil from "only
the client would know the function to derive the checksum". If you want to
convince me that bioinformatics has something to offer cryptology, then you
need to explain to me what property wetware has that silicon doesn't which
causes it to be unlike a classical Turing machine.

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sorbus
The mass of a single base pair is about 1.08E-21 grams. That's 1.85E10^21
bits[1] of information in a single gram of purified DNA, about a forth of a
zettabyte. So, if they're using DNA as the storage mechanism (the slideshow
linked in the article indicates that they are), then 90GB is pretty
insignificant. Sure, the bacteria will all be pretty filled with DNA, but it's
not especially outlandish. Throwing compression at the information (as the
slideshow discusses) makes it even less outlandish.

[1] Each base pair encodes two bits, as DNA and RNA is basically a base-four
sequence (when we're thinking about it as data storage).

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possibilistic
If we were to use yeast, we could additionally include methylation. We don't
have to stop there: we could encode information in histone acetylation states,
transcription levels, etc. to increase this density even further. Granted, how
practical would that be?

Using the regulation machinery might be an interesting way to decrypt
messages, if it were sufficiently complex a signalling pathway...

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dnautics
Yeast don't methylate.

Histone acetylation sites? Epigenetic information is too transient and is not
necessarily passed down in a 1:1 fashion, which is really bad if you're trying
to store data reliably.

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greenlblue
Don't bacteria die, reproduce, and mutate? How is it possible to store
anything long term in room temperature conditions?

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siculars
Everything degrades but I am particularly concerned re. the rate of decay of
anything organic. What's the MTBF?

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sliverstorm
You sure MTBF is still the appropriate term? Perhaps it's time to coin a new
one. How about MTBE- MTB Evolution.

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RyanMcGreal
Or at least Mean Time Before Mutation (MTBM). I'm curious to see the checksum
protein they deploy.

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nickpinkston
Also interesting: they contributed their technique to the BioBricks
Foundation: <http://bbf.openwetware.org>

Very exciting things coming as we get the protein expression laws down well. I
can't wait to use <http://mrgene.com> to sequence DNA and a BioBrick Assembly
kit to put it all together.

<http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE0546.asp>

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dnautics
Biobricks are going to die. Restrtiction digest/ligation is too much of a pain
in the butt. I've been in professional labs where it takes upwards of 8 tries
to get ligation products in. People are going to move to Gibson Assembly. If
you're interested in DIY bio, Gibson Assembly is the way to go.

Obligatory awful youtube video that does a bad job of explaining Gibson
Assembly:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCWjJFU1be8>

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bhickey
Digest & ligate isn't even the worst problem. Back in the day (2006) the
quality control and standardization of bricks was dreadful, I haven't seen
evidence that it's improved substantially since then. Polymerases per second
(POPs), the measure of brick efficiency, seems like a bit of a pipe dream --
I'm yet to be convinced that it can survive brick composition.

Did you do iGEM? Back in the day I started the iGEM team at Brown. We couldn't
scum a PCR machine off anyone so we spent the summer doing minipreps. A few
weeks before the jamboree, we refined our models a bit and showed that the
parameter space in which our project would function was so narrow that it
would probably never work. Oops!

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dnautics
never did iGEM. I think it started when I was in grad school. I'm building a
sub $500 PCR machine now, might start a company to sell them, bio kits, etc.
I'm also thinking about making ethidium-free paradigm (using fluorescent
primer adapters instead) and eliminating the use of E coli so that DIY bio can
really pick up.

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dawgyDoo
My anti-virus software just deleted all my data!

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sukuriant
You mean your antibacterial salve did!

Don't let people with a bandaid on their hand work on your computer, they
might just have Neosporin in there!

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sukuriant
Hehe, sorry, that was silly of me.

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pandassembly
I have to admit that I think that the grand prize winner Slovenia brought up
in my perspective a really simple but genious idea to the competition. Which
might be a lot more worth discussing :)

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agoyal
Wonder if they can replicate data with binary fission (barring mutation.)

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jonhendry
Finally, storage that increases in size faster than your data.

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MortenK
Cloning data takes on a whole new meaning.

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clistctrl
hopefully no one leaves a cheese laying around to infect the hard drives!

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tibbon
Don't you mean that you hope your hard drive doesn't infect your cheese?

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rodericksilva
So, sick people will have more storage space?

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zoomzoom
The human body has more bacteria cells than somatic cells by about 10 to 1.

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eru
Especially your guts.

