We have been hearing of late, comments from folks like Bill Gates, that the days of people running around carrying their information on little silver discs are numbered. He says that one day, we will live in a world of streaming media, that is stored upon hard disc drives, making those toting the optical discs look silly.
However, Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston, disagrees! He says that magnetic storage is not going to cut it in the future, due to the massive amounts of data that we will need to store and or transfer. He thinks a process that he and his colleagues are working on, could well be one that eliminates the need for hard drive memory instead.
Their idea is that DVDs could someday be coated with a layer of protein, that would allow leaps in storage capacities approaching some 50 terabytes per disc. At least that's what we can read in this report about the technique from News in Science.
These trade in terabytes of information with the transfer of information such as satellite images, imaging scans and movies. "You have a compelling need that is not going to be met with the existing magnetic storage technology," he says. Renugopalakrishnan says the new protein-based DVD will have advantages over current optical storage devices (such as the Blue-ray) because the information is stored in proteins that are only a few nanometres across. "You can pack literally thousands and thousands of those proteins on a media like a DVD, a CD or a film or whatever," he says. Renugopalakrishnan says protein-based DVDs will be able to store at least 20 times more than the Blue-ray and eventually even up to 50,000 gigabytes (about 50 terabytes) of information. |
Apparently, the process involves the use of the membrane, of a light activated salt marsh microbe, called Halobacterium salinarum. The special protein, called bacteriorhodopsin (bR), can capture sunlight and convert it to chemical energy. According to Renugopalakrishnan, when exposing bR to light, it changes to a series of unique intermediate molecules before returning to its 'ground state', which in it's natural form, only lasts for a matter of hours. But here is the fascinating part: They have somehow managed to modify the bR protein DNA, to produce an intermediate that lasts for several years, allowing for way to create a binary system to store data.
"The ground state could be the zero and any of the intermediates could be the one," Renugopalakrishnan says. Truly, a case of science fiction becoming reality.
Source: ABC News in Science
