A 3.5-billion-year- old protein may revolutionize data storage. Floppy Bacteria by D. Trull Enigma Editor dtrull@parascope.com With more and more people buying their first computer every day, those of us who've been around the SCSI chain a time or two can't help but chuckle at the charming idiocy of new users. The tech-support horror stories are officially urban legends now: the moron who can't find the "ANY" key, the doofus who copies a disk with a Xerox machine, the hypochondriac who worries that he might come down with a computer virus. How very droll, we scoff with a cyber-elite sneer, to conceive of one's hard drive teeming literally with microorganisms. It is to laugh. Well, we might have to start eating some humble power-user pie, because this is one case in which the slack-jawed troglodytes were unwittingly on the right track. Scientists are close to perfecting the most sophisticated data-storage technology ever developed, and poxy though it may seem, this hard drive of the future is based on nasty little bacteria. The amazing breakthrough exploits a protein found in Halobacterium halobium, a bacteria that lives in salt marshes and requires a habitat with seven times the salinity of seawater. It contains a protein membrane named bacteriorhodopsin, also called bR or "purple membrane," which has some highly remarkable properties in the eyes of scientists and computer geeks. "The protein has been on Earth for 3.5 billion years," said Bob Birge, a Syracuse University professor of chemistry who heads up a bR research team. "Over time, it was optimized through evolution so that it can interact with light in a way that most proteins cannot." The full explanation of what's special about bacteriorhodopsin sounds like something the Professor from Gilligan's Island would spew forth on one of his less provincial days, but essentially, bR is a light-driven proton pump that kicks ass at converting light energy into chemical energy. That makes it an organic substance that's primed and ready for storing electronic data, kind of like floppy disks that grow in pond scum. But purple membrane can hold a heck of a lot more than 1.4 MB. The protein's biggest strength is that it can potentially stow away gigabytes upon gigabytes more easily and effectively than any previous digital media. Traditional hard disks and floppies operate on the basis of magnetically charged sectors on a spinning metallicized platter. Their capacity is intrinsically limited because the sectors can only get so small while remaining distinct to the read head. The laser-based technology of CD-ROMs and optical drives is more unbounded when it comes to huge chunks of data, but boy, is it ever slow, even when handling relatively small files. This is where the bR protein storage system comes to the rescue, offering data accommodations that are fast, safe and indulgently spacious. The possibilities inherent to bacteriorhodopsin are no recent discovery. In the 1970s, a group of Soviet scientists identified it as the most perfect of all known proteins that might be used for data storage. The tricky part has been figuring out how to make it work. Dr. Birge's team has solved the problem of keeping binary data intact in the protein by using lasers of two different wavelengths, one for writing and one for reading. They have developed a working prototype, and it's blindingly quick, so fast it gets held up waiting for the mechanism that points the laser at it. But with a mere capacity of 800 MB and an error rate of 1 in 10,000 bits (compared to the average hard drive error rate of about 1 in 10 to the 13th power), so far it's only a flawed approximation of what bR is capable of. To make protein storage work the way it should, Birge is seeking to develop laser beams fine enough to manipulate bR with the enormously high resolution it can readily accept. Researchers must also improve the gel substance used to hold the protein in suspension, which can introduce errors if it contains even tiny irregularities. The team is getting a helping hand from the Pentagon, which lustfully covets the promise of boundless bR data storage. Consequently, Birge has been granted access to NASA's KC 135 aircraft, the "Vomit Comet" zero-gravity simulator, to see if the bR gel can be created more successfully in weightlessness. There is also talk of protein storage tests being conducted on shuttle flights. It's a quite a touching tale of redemption for the lowly bacteria, unicellular enemy #1 in our microbophobic society of E. Coli burgers and anti-bacterial baby toys. What an irony that our great-grandchildren's computers will come equipped with unthinkably powerful 10-terabyte protein drives, and it'll all be thanks to our germy friend Halobacterium halobium, the prodigal prokaryote. And the tech-support guys will assure them that crashes can't be caused by Lysol. Sources: Wired News; Iddo Friedberg's Bacteriorhodopsin Home Page; The Center for Photonics Research. Special thanks to technical advisor Shea Tisdale. (c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc. More Fortean Slips! Share your views in the Fortean Slips message board!