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Synthetic Biology Book Published in DNA
A trio of researchers has encoded a draft of a whole book into DNA. The 5.27-megabit tome contains 53,246 words, 11 JPG image files and a JavaScript program, making it the largest piece of non-biological data ever stored in this way.
DNA has the potential to store huge amounts of information. In theory, two bits of data can be incorporated per nucleotide — the single base unit of a DNA string — so each gram of the double-stranded molecule could store 455 exabytes of data (1 exabyte is 1018 bytes). Such dense packing outstrips inorganic data-storage devices such as flash memory, hard disks or even storage based on quantum-computing methods.
The book, which is fittingly a treatise on synthetic biology, was encoded by geneticists George Church and Sriram Kosuri at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, Massachusetts, and Yuan Gao, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. They report their work in Science1 this week.
It marks a significant gain on previous projects — the largest of which encoded less than one-six-hundredth of the data — but organic flash drives are still many years away. There are a number of reasons why the method is not practical for everyday use. For example, both storing and retrieving information currently require several days of lab work, spent either synthesizing DNA from scratch or sequencing it to read the data.
The work illustrates the potential of nonconventional approaches, says Stuart Parkin, who is developing dense forms of inorganic storage media at the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center in San Jose, California. "You could say that the physical sciences have exhausted the playground of concepts, and we now need to go beyond that world," he says. “This coupling of the biological world to the physical world will lead to some very interesting storage devices in the next decade."
Short and sweet
Encoding the DNA book didn't involve fundamentally new technology so much as the creative application of existing techniques, explains Anne Condon, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who studies how DNA molecules can be used in computing.
Previous attempts to store information in DNA have been held up by difficulties in making perfect long strands. Shorter molecules present less of a challenge, so Church and his colleagues kept their storage strands a mere 159 nucleotides long, and generated multiple copies of each to make catching and correcting mutations easier.
In each single strand, 96 nucleotides represented the encoded data as digital ones and zeroes; 19 nucleotides showed how these data blocks should be ordered; and 44 nucleotides enabled easier sequencing. The researchers' binary code assigned 'zero' to two types of nucleotide (As and Cs) and 'one' to the other two types (Gs and Ts).
“It's using some simple ideas in very elegant ways to improve the density of information that one can store,” says Condon. She says that the technology will work best for specialized applications in which data need to be stored for a long time without being read.
The ideal storage period might be as long as centuries, says Kosuri. Even as other storage technologies become as obsolete as magnetic tape and floppy disks are now, researchers will always be trying to improve technology for reading and writing DNA, because the molecule is so central to biology.
And that will bring costs down over time, enabling DNA data storage to move beyond the realm of demonstration projects. The cost of sequencing technologies has already fallen to about a thousandth of what it was four years ago, says Kosuri, and DNA synthesis has achieved the same drops over the past eight years. "The DNA chip we used for this paper held 55,000 oligonucleotides," he adds. "The newest ones hold a million."
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=synthetic-biology-book-published-dna
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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