Comment by xevb3k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xevb3k | Hacker News Reader

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From memory the base spacing on double stranded DNA is ~0.4nm. So it’s significantly dense. They’re taking about using 30 bases to encode a single symbol, so density is worse than that.

However the basic density isn’t really the factor of interest. What’s more interesting about DNA is that you don’t need to store it on a surface. So while with semiconductors, you can only really cover a 2d surface (and maybe stack a few dies for density). With DNA you can pack a lot more information into a 3 dimensional area.

I however am not particularly bullish in DNA storage. We don’t really have the read systems we’d need to make this viable (still costs ~1000USD to read the ~ 1Gigabyte human genome and > 1 day). Unless these guys have really developed something very novel, we don’t have the write systems either.

Both the read and write systems are also highly errored compared to digital storage (like error rates of 1 in 100). So their are many issues...

> still costs ~1000USD to read the ~ 1Gigabyte human genome

This piece is dropping fast though; Dante Labs will currently do it (with 30X coverage) for individuals for $500 [1]. And I believe the price for labs that do a lot of sequencing is significantly lower per-genome.

Writing is still a much bigger challenge, though. Writing something the size of the human genome is currently considered a "grand challenge" and is being tackled by HGP-Write:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_Project-Write#Human_Gen...

[1] https://us.dantelabs.com/products/whole-genome-sequencing-wg...

Wow, this is the first I'm hearing of Dante Labs. That price point for 30X WGS coverage is seriously impressive.

They are just using Illumina sequencers so they are simply taking a loss on each test.

That’s an impressive price, do you know anyone who’s done it? I’d be interested in knowing what the experience was like.

Illumina appear to be targeting 100USD right now. I think their markup on reagents is probably at least x10...

But even that’s super expensive compared to reading data from a HD... so you have to wonder where DNA as storage is viable. Unless a vastly cheaper read method becomes available.

I don't know anyone who's done it (it's still a bit too expensive for me to give it a shot) but it appears to be a fairly standard saliva sample kit that you mail in.

Yes compared to HDD it's way too expensive to read. However tape backups are also cumbersome and time-consuming to use, but the fact that you can get extremely cheap bulk storage from them means lots of big companies still use them. So I could see it maybe being competitive there (eventually).

Good point about 3D, I forgot about it. Makes sense; I remember looking at how DNA is packed within a cell in "The Machinery of Life" and thinking just how ridiculously dense it is. But with such packing, you can mostly forget about random access; it's more of a tape storage. Which makes me think - if all we need is dense sequential storage of bits, then we should be able to do better than DNA by going with some simpler substances that can be stacked in layers or wrapped around some core. It's probably gonna be more complicated than nano-sized ball of bit-carrying yarn, but we don't need to replicate all the structural features of DNA.

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