by LIN EDWARDS
A team of researchers in the US has successfully encoded a 5.27 megabit book using DNA microchips, and they then read the book using DNA sequencing. Their experiments show that DNA could be used for long-term storage of digital information.
George Church and Sriram Kosuri of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and colleagues, encoded Church’s book “Regenesis” of around 53,400 words into DNA sequences, along with 11 images in JPG format and a JavaScript program. This is 1,000 times more data than has been encoded in DNA previously. DNA is made up of nucleotides, and in theory at least each nucleotide can be used to encode two bits of data. This means that the density is a massive 1 million gigabits per cubic millimeter, and only four grams of DNA could theoretically store all the digital data created annually. This is much denser than digital storage media such as flash drives, and more stable, since the DNA sequences could be read thousands of years after they were encoded.
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