Biostorage Scheme Turns E. Coli Bacteria into Hard Drives
E. coli gets a bad rap - probably due to the violent illness it induces - but a group of Chinese University students in Hong Kong have found a novel and potentially reputation-changing use for the bacteria: data storage. The team has devised a way to encrypt and store information in the DNA of bacteria to such an effective degree that they say just one gram of E. coli could store the same amount of data as 450 2,000-gig hard drives. Biostorage, or the storing of data in living things, is nascent but not new, having been around for about a decade. But earlier efforts at encoding data into DNA have been incremental - for instance, a few years back a team of Japanese researchers encoded Einstein's relativity equation into the DNA of bacteria, demonstrating that it was possible but otherwise not pushing the field forward. Related ArticlesBacteria Colony May Grow Nanowires...