Digital Home Thoughts: Biological Light-Sensitive Protein Could Make Hard Drives Obsolete

"An Indian born scientist in the US is working on developing DVD's which can be coated with a light -sensitive protein and can store up to 50 terabytes (about 50,000 gigabytes) of data. 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'."

Announcements like this are always exciting: who wouldn't want massive storage on this scale? The problem though is making it a reality. I remember reading an article in Wired, easily over a decade ago, that talked about biological data storage and how it was going to be the future (Star Trek Voyager even had "bio-gel packs"). Yet for all the talk of breakthroughs, nothing has ever come of it. The potential is certainly there - maybe in 20 years we'll be feeding our computers banana peels to power the the Flux Capacitor.