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Showing posts from January, 2013

Storing Information in DNA (efficiently)

A recent article in the Economist summarizes work done in Cambridge by Dr. Goldman, Dr. Birney and their teams.  They came up with a mapping for data into base pairs for storage in DNA; while today DNA storage is quite expensive, it is quickly decreasing in cost...and DNA has the advantage that information does not decay anywhere near as fast as other current storage mediums; 10's of thousands of years vs a handful.  The DNA format is also unlikely to change, so it may remain a more consistent technology than others.   The team in Cambridge came up with a way to ensure that base pairs do not repeat, as sequencing errors are much higher when there are strings of the same base.  The encoding table is shown above.  First the digital data is converted to base 3, and then a differential coding is used to write so that no base pair ever repeats.  For example, if the last base was A, and we are looking to encode a 2, then we would write a T. It struck me immediately that this was