[Note that the article below says one cubic centimeter of DNA, i.e. something the size of the end of a man's index finger, can hold the equivalent of 10 million one terabyte hard disks (10 billion gigabytes of data). Amazing . . . SC]

By Michael Irving - November 26, 2024

As efficient as electronic data storage systems can be, they’ve got nothing on nature’s own version – DNA. A new technique for writing data to DNA works like a printing press and makes it easy enough that anyone could do it

Writing data to DNA usually involves synthesizing strands one letter at a time, like threading beads onto a string.

That’s obviously a very slow process, especially when there can be billions of those letters, or bases, in a given DNA sequence.

But the new DNA printing press drastically speeds the process up. The team created a set of 700 DNA bricks, each containing 24 bases, that work like movable type pieces.

These can be arranged into a desired order and then used to ‘print’ their data onto DNA template strands.

Rather than writing one bit at a time, this printing press speeds it up to 350 bits simultaneously, per reaction.

To simplify the process, data isn’t encoded into the usual GCAT letters of DNA, but the familiar ones and zeroes of binary code. In this case, chemical markers were attached to some DNA bricks but not others – those with markers represented ones, and those without were the zeroes.

The team tested the technique by storing images, including 16,833 bits for an ancient Chinese rubbing of a tiger, and a photo of a panda made up of over 252,500 bits. After some tweaking, 100 percent of the data could be recovered using standard DNA reading methods.

To show off how simple it could be to use, the team ran an experiment with 60 people. Participants used a software platform called iDNAdrive to encode pieces of text of their choice, totaling around 5,000 bits.

Data was successfully read back with 98.58 percent accuracy.

The appeal of DNA data storage is clear. For one it’s incredibly dense – it’s been estimated that you could store more than 10 billion gigabytes of data in just 1 cm3 of DNA. Better yet, stored under the right conditions this data can last thousands or even millions of years, making it a great archival system.

Reading data from DNA is relatively fast, but writing is the bottleneck . . .

[SNIP]