Sunday, January 27, 2013
Future of Data: DNA via Ed Yong on National Geographic: When Nick Goldman first opened the package, he couldn’t quite believe that it contained anything at all, much less all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The parcel had come from a facility in the US and arrived at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK, in March 2012.  It contained a series of small plastic vials, at the bottom of which were… apparently nothing. It was Goldman’s colleague Ewan Birney who showed him the tiny dust-like specks that he had missed. These specks were DNA, and they contained: All of the Bard’s 154 sonnets. A 26-second clip of Martin Luther King’s legendary “I have a dream” speech A PDF of James Watson and Francis Crick’s classic paper where they detailed the structure of DNA A JPEG photo of Goldman and Birney’s institute A code that converted all of that into DNA in the first place The team sent the vials off to a facility in Germany, where colleages dissolved the DNA in water, sequenced it, and reconstructed all the files with 100 percent accuracy. It vindicated the team’s efforts to encode digital information into DNA using a new technique—one that could be easily scaled up to global levels. And it showed the potential of the famous double-helix as a way of storing our growing morass of data. […] [read more] [Goldman Group] [similar project] [paper] [image by Goldman et al., Nature]

Future of Data: DNA

via Ed Yong on National Geographic:

When Nick Goldman first opened the package, he couldn’t quite believe that it contained anything at all, much less all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The parcel had come from a facility in the US and arrived at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK, in March 2012.  It contained a series of small plastic vials, at the bottom of which were… apparently nothing. It was Goldman’s colleague Ewan Birney who showed him the tiny dust-like specks that he had missed.

These specks were DNA, and they contained:

  • All of the Bard’s 154 sonnets.
  • A 26-second clip of Martin Luther King’s legendary “I have a dream” speech
  • A PDF of James Watson and Francis Crick’s classic paper where they detailed the structure of DNA
  • A JPEG photo of Goldman and Birney’s institute
  • A code that converted all of that into DNA in the first place

The team sent the vials off to a facility in Germany, where colleages dissolved the DNA in water, sequenced it, and reconstructed all the files with 100 percent accuracy. It vindicated the team’s efforts to encode digital information into DNA using a new technique—one that could be easily scaled up to global levels. And it showed the potential of the famous double-helix as a way of storing our growing morass of data. […]

[read more] [Goldman Group] [similar project] [paper] [image by Goldman et al., Nature]

Posted at 12:07 PM 258 notes Tags: future tech data storage DNA biotech

Notes

  1. terminallytantalizing reblogged this from futurescope
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  8. whathofstadterdoesntsay reblogged this from cnce
  9. theparadoxparade reblogged this from novum-ordinem and added:
    I heard this on NPR the other day. It’s freaking amazing.
  10. tutmondigo reblogged this from cnce
  11. lbb96 reblogged this from futurescope and added:
    Who needs memory cards when you have, urm wait what… D.N.A
  12. davidlauro reblogged this from emergentfutures
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  20. catchingtime reblogged this from starsandboulevards and added:
    Holy shit.
  21. notevensurewhy reblogged this from wildcat2030
  22. lberry6595 reblogged this from futurescope and added:
    Wow…
  23. rocnror reblogged this from cnce and added:
    OK. Now I’m really dumbfounded.
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