Scientists Just Took a Step Toward Using Living Cells as Hard Drives
A 72-bit message was encoded directly into bacterial DNA
Humans are generating digital data at a rate that could eventually outpace our available storage. Sprawling data centers lined with rows and rows of computer servers currently allow us to store, back up, and recover our data, but they’re costly to maintain, take up too much space, and consume huge amounts of electricity.
That’s why researchers are so interested in a much smaller and denser form of data storage: DNA.
To store information in DNA, a data file’s binary code — zeros and ones — is first converted into the four DNA bases — A, C, G, and T. Then, scientists chemically synthesize strands of DNA to match the desired sequence. Recently, researchers encoded an episode of the Netflix show Biohackers and 52 pages of Mozart music into DNA. A major benefit of DNA storage is that unlike a floppy disk or flash drive, DNA will never be obsolete.
