Dna As Data Storage

[scameter]

Is it possibly for our technology specialists to apply DNA as a mass data storer? DNA has the capacity to hold more information then the best supercomputer, so would it not be possibly to use it as a data storer and even processor of bits of information?

[Thomas Knierim]

You can't be talking about data size. The human genome is roughly 3.2 billion base pairs. It would easily fit on your harddisk. Ironically, the largest known genome belongs to an amoeba and contains 670 billion base pairs. The amoeba's entire genome would propbably still fit on your home PC. Large storage supercomputers today have petabyte capacities, enough to deal with whole genome libraries.

DNA is pretty amazing when it comes to spatial packing, however. Imagine several giga base pairs packed into the tiny space of a cell nucleus with a diameter of only 10-20 micrometres. This amounts to a spatial information density which is not reached even by the most advanced chip technology. A state-of-the-art flash memory card reaches a density of roughly 0.5 Gigabit per cubic millimetre. So, you can do the math and see how much more fits on a heap of DNA of that size.

Cheers, Thomas

[scameter]

Well, that was really my point: the extremely minute size of something able to hold what computers have to hold on things much larger; as well as it's processing ability (not to mention it's power in nanotechnology).

[locomotive]

maybe in the future people can grow computers

[scameter]

It really wouldn't be very difficult to do locomotive, except that the actually growth of the organism that we would specifically and only use as a computational device would morph and attempt to reproduce, attempting to be alive, and even if we attempted to hinder that, we could only do it to an extent; nature will persist and adapt, a large aspect of evolution.

[locomotive]

uhh..no? organs that grow up don't try to reproduce themselfs.

[scameter]

I didn't say organ, I said organism. If indeed an organism is grown and alive it will try to reproduce, and if there are no mates for it to reproduce with sexually, nature will adapt, if over an extended period of time, to attain the ability to reproduce asexually; and many other organisms alive have capabilities to sustain themselves even if unable to reproduce.