stock.xchng, schulergdResearchers have done it again—encoding 5.2 million bits of digital data in strings of DNA and demonstrating the feasibility of using DNA as a long-term, data-dense storage medium for massive amounts of information. In the new study released today (January 23) in Nature, researchers encoded one color photograph, 26 seconds of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and all 154 of Shakespeare’s known sonnets into DNA.
Though it’s not the first example of storing digital data in DNA, “it’s important to celebrate the emergence of a field,” said George Church, the Harvard University synthetic biologist whose own group published a similar demonstration of DNA-based data storage last year in Science. The new study, he said, “is moving things forward.”
Scientists have long recognized DNA’s potential as a long-term storage medium. “DNA is a very, very dense piece of information storage,” explained study author Ewan Birney of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the UK. “It’s very light, it’s very small.” Under the correct storage conditions—dry, dark and cold—DNA easily withstands degradation, he said.
Advances in synthesizing defined strings of DNA, and sequencing them to extract information, have finally ...
