• A new wiki page cataloging “various other gene-editing proteins” was published at http://diyhpl.us/diyhpluswiki/gene-editing/ to serve as a growing library of DNA “string-manipulation” tools.

• Participants debated the practicality of DNA as an ultra-high-density archival medium, with kanzure citing IARPA funding and CaptHindsight dismissing it as a “gimmick” unless the goal is covert storage inside living tissue.

• Detailed cost/performance figures for LTO tape were calculated: LTO-6 cartridges store 2.5 TB for ~$27 (≈1.35×10⁻¹² USD/bit), deliver ~400–750 MB/s, and yield ~8.65×10¹⁶ bit/m³ and ~9.5×10¹³ bit/kg, setting a quantitative benchmark against which future molecular storage schemes must compete.

• Optical control of peptide–protein interactions was explored through LOV-domain photoswitches; caged LOV-ipaA and LOV-SsrA peptides showed 48× and 8× affinity increases upon illumination, but the ~1 s switching time is still too slow for envisioned nanopore-based DNA writing at 100 ms/base.

• A speculative “hairy-ssDNA” write scheme was proposed: a single-stranded DNA scaffold densely functionalized with light-activated caps and editing groups that can be selectively removed or modified by flashes of light to iteratively rewrite the strand in situ.

• RecA-like nucleoprotein filaments were discussed as a biological search-and-retrieval mechanism for DNA data archives; yashgaroth explained that 5–6 RecA monomers load onto a primer, hydrolyze ATP to melt dsDNA, and can be paused with ATP-γ-S, offering a programmable, energy-efficient addressing system.

• Concerns were raised about George Church’s claim that human-genome synthesis could reach $6,000, with a critic arguing that the underlying 2004 chemistry paper does not scale to “gigascale” synthesis and that Church’s projections habitually ignore fundamental rate and error limitations.

• Links to recent literature were shared, including a 2016 paper extracting polymerase translocation dynamics from 200 crystal structures, a 2013 Nature Chemistry review on α-helix-mediated PPI inhibitors, and the HelixWorks MoSS DNA-synthesis white-paper (https://openmoss.org/docs/MoSS.pdf).