Coding messages into DNA was first demonstrated in the 1980s, but technology at the time would only allow one graphical symbol to be encoded. While that capacity has grown over the last 3 decades, the largest project to date, completed in 2010, managed just 7,920 bits of data, equating to approximately half a page of typed text. Using a novel technique, detailed today in Science, researchers at Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities, have now encoded a 53,000-word book into DNA, including 11 JPG images and one JavaScript program.
"Others have pointed out that DNA has certain advantages," said study co-author Sriram Kosuri. "But no one had really taken it to a level that we were able to code really useful amounts of information."
Those advantages include the density of information that can be stored: an estimate of maximum capacity predicts that one gram of single-strand DNA could store as much ...
