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by greenlblue 5685 days ago
Don't bacteria die, reproduce, and mutate? How is it possible to store anything long term in room temperature conditions?
2 comments

it's possible, they have pretty spectacular error correction mechanisms. Just don't blast it with UV.

There are two problems with bacterial data storage. The first is information retrieval. Running a sequencer is no fun.

The second problem is genetic recombination, which is what they are using to 'achieve encryption'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_recombination

Of course, there's going to be some toxic DNA sitting in the sequences they are making, and it will be to the advantage of the bacteria to spit it out, they will find a way to do it with recombinases, even the ones with the most pernicious recombinase (recA) knocked out.

Everything degrades but I am particularly concerned re. the rate of decay of anything organic. What's the MTBF?
You sure MTBF is still the appropriate term? Perhaps it's time to coin a new one. How about MTBE- MTB Evolution.
Or at least Mean Time Before Mutation (MTBM). I'm curious to see the checksum protein they deploy.