Link to the article and reddit link where I ran across this. Also the journal article for science students.

Found it pretty fascinating that they managed to do this, biotechnology is really advancing now. The technology is far from being usable practically, but the fact that they manipulated DNA like this is just amazing. And that it's capacity is exponentially larger than our technology so far.

Viruses will still exist though...just biological now haha. Wonder how long it will be before we have to worry about our technology getting cancer, too.

While this truly is incredible, it is by no means as ground-breaking as everyone is making it out to be. Well, at least those people that are "headline-readers". Encoding information as a nucleotide sequence has been possible since around 1995. However, what is really groundbreaking is the technology these researchers used, which as the article said, smashed the previous data density 10,000-fold. Plus, what previously took weeks to do can now be done in a matter of hours.

As a redditor put it, one drop of DNA encoded and decoded in this fashion can replace 151 kilograms of traditional HDDs. That's insane; almost incomprehensible.

And in-before people start asking what it would be like to transcribe such data to make a (possibly living) organism. Not possible. Even translation into functional proteins is very, very, very improbable. To put it in perspective, the human genome is made up of 3164.7 million nucleotide bases. A point mutation – a change in just one of those bases – can result in one of a bajillion various life-threatening complications, and sometimes even prevent "life" from forming. So now take a completely random sequence (from the perspective of a functional genome). All you have is human or machine-readable data.

What makes this amazing is that for data storage purposes DNA is incredibly stable. Most errors occur during replication. That leads to my biggest question. What implications does this have on cancer research? I'm sure that this research will lead to research on DNA replication and error checking. Is is possible to engineer DNA replication mechanisms completely independent from that in humans or other lifeforms? Maybe a more accurate, less delicate system? Could we eventually see DNA purely as a means of data storage, something that can be accurately duplicated, but treated in a way completely unrelated to life.

Oh geez, as if we didn't have it bad enough with susceptible to artificially constructed viruses by programs (computer viruses), now we could face physical/biological viruses...

As for the 700TB headline... isn't it pointless without knowing what sort of times there are available to access said data? Its my understanding that transcription/translation and other biological processes happen insanely fast, but is this on the level that's acceptable to the point of usefulness?

Originally Posted by RyanC

Oh geez, as if we didn't have it bad enough with susceptible to artificially constructed viruses by programs (computer viruses), now we could face physical/biological viruses...

As for the 700TB headline... isn't it pointless without knowing what sort of times there are available to access said data? Its my understanding that transcription/translation and other biological processes happen insanely fast, but is this on the level that's acceptable to the point of usefulness?

From what I can tell from the paper's abstract and the news article, assuming the data has already been encoded in DNA, to access this data, you would just need to sequence the DNA - currently, the fastest form of sequencing available is "next-generation sequencing" (as opposed to standard methods like Sanger sequencing). With NGS, you can apparently sequence the entire genome of an organism within hours. It will also cost you a hell of a lot of money.

So, it's definitely not fast or cheap enough for regular, wide-spread use - yet, that is; who knows what they'll come up with in the future. But, at the moment, I think the main application of this would be for long-term storage, where you wouldn't be encoding and accessing the data regularly (the news article mentions this as well).