A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
The work, done by George Church and Sri Kosuri, turns DNA into another digital storage device. Instead of binary being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0). To read the data stored, you simply sequence the DNA and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary.
Scientists have been contemplating DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time because:
- Incredible density can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms in size.
- Volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk) meaning it stores data in 3 dimensions rather than only on a flat surface like a hard disk.
- Incredibly stable in comparisson to traditional storage media which need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.