Data in DNA

Researchers have successfully encoded 739 KB of data residing on a hard disk, transformed it into a DNA sequence, and then read it back without any errors by sequencing the chain.

This isn't the first time it's been done, but this method is more efficient, scalable, and ensures 100% accuracy. The stored data includes an audio recording of Martin Luther King Jr. (the famous I Have a Dream), the text of 154 Shakespeare sonnets, and the original article by Watson and Crick describing, for the first time, the structure of the double helix.

Since I'm not a biologist, the details are beyond my knowledge (plus, the article is paid for, and I was only able to read part of it). What I understood is that each possible byte (an 8-bit sequence that forms numbers from 0 to 255) was encoded in a sequence of 5 DNA bases, and then a genetic code chain formed from this series of bytes was synthesized. The DNA bases are A, C, G, and T. A byte such as 124 (01111100) is encoded as TAGAT.

By lining up the encoded bytes in this way, one chain of the double helix is constructed, while the other is formed by the complementary bases (the bases do not bond freely: A can only bond with T, and G can only bond with C).

Beyond the technical details, this work opens up horizons that were difficult to imagine. First and foremost, in terms of memory capacity. It is estimated that one gram of DNA can store the contents of more than a million CDs, which corresponds to approximately 700 million megabytes, or 700,000 GB, or 700 TB. The result is that all human knowledge could be stored in a few kilograms of DNA. Furthermore, DNA is durable, much more secure than current media (from a small amount of organic matter, DNA that is thousands of years old can be extracted).

For a laugh, DNA is organic: for once, the expression my hard drive died will cease to be a metaphor.

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