Prof. Renugopalakrishnan and his team at Harvard Medical School in Boston have discovered a unique protein that could possibly be used to store up to 50,000-gigabytes (50-terabytes) of data onto medium the size of our DVDs.
Well, I’ve covered ferroelectricity technology that promises more than a thousand times greater storage space than this. But both technologies are just as out-of-reach right now.
The light-activated protein is found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum and is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and colour before returning to its ‘ground state’.
As the intermediates only lasts for hours or days, the professor had to modify the DNA that produces this protein to extend it up to several years. Not quite enough I would say. After all, do you really want to re-backup that 50-terabytes every couple of years?
But ferroelectricity or proteins, we don’t really care. Just give us our next-gen uber-large storage technology before our storerooms are decked full of DVD/Blu-ray/HD-DVD backups. Blame it on BitTorrent.
July 14th, 2006 at 3:05 am
Sounds fascinating; But do we want to advance that fast? ot the better questions, will huge corporations let us advance that fast rather than holding the fire grow steady…?
Allen
July 18th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
o_O this will be interesting 50tb’s… jeez thats a hole lot of storage on just one dvd sized disk. Yeah i expect big corporations will eat this up and slowly release it as thats a very very huge step ahead from what we have atm.
Wonder if they can use this new Protein in HDD’s as dam i would only need 1 not 3
MonKeY