Daily News, Yahoo Wrote:Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston has claimed to have developed a layer of protein made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins which could store enough data to make computer hard disks almost obsolete.

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'.

Since the intermediates generally only last for hours or days, Prof Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues modified the DNA that produces bR protein to produce an intermediate that lasts for more than several years. They also engineered the bR protein to make its intermediates more stable at the high temperatures generated by storing terabytes of data.

Prof Renugopalakrishnan now opines that the protein layer could also allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information.

The new protein-based DVD will have advantages over current optical storage devices such as the Blue-ray as well, because the information is stored in proteins that are only a few nanometres across.

"The 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. You can pack literally thousands and thousands of those proteins on a media like a DVD, a CD or a film or whatever," he said.

source: Daily News, Yahoo

Wikipedia Wrote:Protein-Coated Disc (PCD) is a theoretical optical disc technology currently being developed by Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of Harvard Medical School. PCD would greatly increase storage over Holographic Versatile Disc optical disc systems. It involves coating a normal DVD with a special light-sensitive protein made from a genetically altered microbe, which would in principle allow storage of up to 50 Terabytes on one disc. Working with the Japanese NEC Corporation, Renugopalakrishnan's team has created a prototype device and estimate that a USB disk will be commercialised in 12 months and a DVD in 18 to 24 months as of July, 2006

Source: Wikipedia

The idea was presented at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane in July 2006.

If wikipedia is correct, (I personally doubt that) then sometime next year, wee could be getting commercial 50TB disks!!!

...I wonder how much they will cost though.

Wow, and I thought holographic disc technology was cutting-edge.

Damn, 50 terabyte's.
Those are gonna cost alot of money.

more space, more porno ;)

lol

they're gonna put a big whole in peoples pockets.

That's for sure.

What would you store on 50TB?!?  That's like 500 people's 200GB drives!

50TB, hmm, that's 1,000,000 MP3s (assuming ~5MB each) or 71,500 movies (~700MB each).

>_>

Crazy

matchung Wrote:more space, more porno ;)