Like all the best ideas, this one was born in a pub. Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge, were pondering what they could do with the torrent of genomic data their research group generates, all of which has to be archived.
The volume of data is growing faster than the capacity of the hard drives used to hold it. “That means the cost of storage is rising, but our budgets are not,” says Dr Goldman. Over a few beers, the pair began wondering if artificially constructed DNA might be one way to store the data torrent generated by the natural stuff. After a few more drinks and much scribbling on beer mats, what started out as a bit of amusing speculation had turned into the bones of a workable scheme. After some fleshing out and a successful test run, the full details were published this week in Nature.
The idea is not new. DNA is, after all, already used to store information in the form of genomes by every living organism on Earth. Its prowess at that job is the reason that information scientists have been trying to co-opt it for their own uses. But this has not been without problems.
via The Economist
January 25, 2013
