The experimental results than Leonard Adleman obtained in 1994 while using DNA to compute the direct Hamiltonian path problem with just 7 nodes do not seem encouraging. It took him several days of lab work to complete the experiment. Furthermore, although DNA computation offers a potential in terms of data storage, there is also the issue of molecular volatility.
Can biological computation provide a better alternative to classical computation?
Microsoft ponders storing cloud data
in the form of DNA.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607880/microsoft-has-a-plan-to-add-dna-data-storage-to-its-cloud/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dnastorage-asplos16.pdf
I'm sceptical. On can often read how
much DNA molecules would fit into
a sugar cube. What is not being said is
redundancy is needed since a single
molecule can get lost.
A human cell has DNA information for an equivalent
of about one DVD, and there are hundreds of
billions of cells in the human body.
But all cells bear the same information,
it's like having hundreds of billion
times the same copy of a DVD.
For information retrieval a droplet of
a DNA storage must be sacrificed:
the sections must be amplified with
something like polymerase in a
thermocycler, then be sequenced.
Even if this could get somehow
accelerated, the problem with this
method is, that, if you want to
read DNA by drawing a sample,
you must be pretty sure that the
one droplet you take contains a
version of the desired DNA snippet
as well as the rest of the liquid.
Regards,
Joachim
Thank you, Joachim, for your reply.
I wonder whether there is a way to avoid the redundancy of DNA material by making sure that molecules do not "get lost", as you said. For instance, could the deamination process that converts cytosine to uracil be prevented by some quantum mechanical mechanisms?
Renata
Maybe you have the Quantum Zeno Effect
in mind, which can be exploited to prevent
the decay of a radioactive particle
(a watched pot never boils). But the
states here are classical ones, I don't
think that this effect applies here.
Nucleotide misincorporation could be combated
with special codes, error correcting codes.
But if you use DNA as storage material, you
have an enormous amount of redundancy anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction
Regards,
Joachim
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