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.
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