It’s pretty frequent that new technologies appear and promise new levels of storage capacity and the technology professor V Renugopalakrishnan at Harvard Medical School in Boston is working on is truly one of the more exciting. Renugopalakrishnan claims that he has created a technology that will make it possible to store up to 50 000GB (50TB) of data on a regular DVD. The key to this fantastic technology is a layer consisting out of a light sensitive protein. When light hits the protein it reacts and changes shape, the protein then returns to its original shape after a few hour,s or a day or so, and it is this professor V Renugopalakrishnan has been focusing on.
He has namely managed to control the protein so that it can keep its new shape for several years. This way he has made it possible to store binary data where the protein’s original shape could represent the 0 and the new shape the 1.
“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,”
If and when this technology would be used with commercial products is impossible to predict, but its pretty easy to imagine how many would be interested in the technology.
