As the rate With the rise of AI, humanity’s data generation is rapidly increasing, scientists have shown interest in it DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing data. It encodes genetic information and sets the blueprint for every living thing on Earth.
And DNA is at least 1,000 times more compact than solid-state hard drives. To show how abstract, researchers first Encoded all 154 sonnets of Shakespeare, 52 pages of Mozart’s musicAnd An episode of the Netflix show “Biohackers”. In small amounts of DNA.
But these were research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn’t quite mainstream yet, but it may be getting close. Now you can buy what may be the first commercially available book written in DNA. today, Asimov Press Began a collection of biotechnology articles and science fiction stories encoded in strands of DNA. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book and the nucleic acid version—a metal capsule filled with dried DNA.
To encode the book in DNA, Asimov Press worked with the Boston-based company Catalog, which created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the book’s 240 pages, which represent 481,280 bytes of data.
Traditional DNA data storage works by converting a digital file’s binary code of 0s and 1s into As, Cs, Gs, and Ts — the building blocks of DNA. Custom DNA strands are chemically synthesized letter by letter to match the desired sequence.
The catalog instead uses a method called combinatorial assembly, which the company likens to the Gutenberg printing press. As movable letters can be arranged to form words, the catalog created an alphabet of DNA fragments that can be assembled to represent bits. The company collects those DNA snippets and then uses enzymes to encode information into them. David Turek, the catalog’s chief technology officer, said it costs in the low tens of thousands of dollars to encode the book in DNA and make 1,000 copies.
“It’s a case where you encode something in DNA once and you can make as many copies as you want using the tools of molecular biology,” he says. “It’s fairly easy to do in volume.”
In 2023, the French company BioMemory A $1,000 DNA storage card That allows customers to store about one kilobyte of data of their choice, the equivalent of a small email. At the time, CEO Irfan Arwani told Wired that the offering was an experiment to gauge consumer interest in DNA data storage. “We wanted to show that our process is ready to be shown to the world,” he said.
The cards were expensive, however, because synthesizing DNA is still a fairly slow and expensive process. The catalog claims that its combined approach is more efficient. Making identical copies of the same book also reduced the price.
After being encoded by the catalog, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and shipped to France, where biological storage firm Imagen packaged the molecules in stainless steel capsules with an airtight internal environment, meaning no oxygen inside. or no moisture. In this state, the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.
