
Storing Data in DNA [pdf] - ChuckMcM
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~luisceze/publications/dnastorage-asplos16.pdf
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aaronmck
If this kind of work interests you, I'd also recommending reading Yaniv Erlich
and Dina Zielinski's DNA fountain paper (which just came out in Science).
They've done some really nice work on error correction, and they also
understand the sequencing technology limitations, etc. Of course this is all
really expensive to read and write now, but sequencing technology is only
getting cheaper and cheaper. Here' the link to the updated preprint:
[http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/12/04/074237.f...](http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/12/04/074237.full.pdf)

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ChuckMcM
I had to share this, there have been a couple of news stories about storing
information in DNA and personally I find the topic really fascinating. I
suspect however that it is impractical to store data in a medium which
requires DNA sequencing to extract, (very long 'time to recover' in the
disaster management parlance) but its a fascinating idea in general.

But there are lots of natural techniques to copy dna and repair it when it
fails to copy properly so durability should be solid.

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lallysingh
Can we embed this data in dormant DNA in existing life? Can I hide my PGP keys
in the DNA of my houseplant?

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johnhenry
Of course you could, but now that we know you plan to hide you PGP keys in
your plants, you're hit by the old "security-by-obscurity" fallacy. :/

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lallysingh
Just xor it with a one time pad, encoded in a fern.

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patall
What I never understand in these studies is why they always want to go for
single base resolution immediately. Sequencing and writing is so expensive
because any error you make is a real problem. If instead, every bit was
encoded by a default oligomer of 5 times the same base, you could live with
much higher error rates. You would loose density but still achieve multiple
orders of magnitude over current storage solutions.

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OrthoMetaPara
In addition to mitigating errors in copying as you've highlighted, there is
also the possibility that some stretch of bases in your message would have
some deleterious effect on the organism. Thus, you would need to include some
kind of redundancy into your code so that a bit could be represented in
several different ways. The computer that encoded the message could then try
to optimize the message so that it would be maximally amenable to storage.

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amingilani
I wonder what their read/write speeds were.

