As rate As human data production has increased dramatically with the advent of artificial intelligence, scientists have become interested in DNA as a means of storing digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing data. It encodes genetic information and determines the blueprint of every living organism on Earth.
The DNA is at least 1,000 times more compact than solid-state hard drives. To explain how cohesive this material is, researchers have previously done this He encoded all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 52 pages of Mozart’s musicand An episode of the Netflix show “Biohackers” to trace amounts of DNA.
But these were research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn’t quite mainstream yet, but it might be getting close. You can now buy what may be the first commercially available book written with DNA. today, Asimov Press An anthology of biotechnology articles and science fiction stories encoded in strands of DNA appears for the first time. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book as well as the DNA version, which is a metal capsule filled with dried DNA.
To encode the book with DNA, Asimov’s Press worked with a Boston-based catalog company, which created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the book’s 240 pages, representing 481,280 bytes of data.
Traditional DNA data storage works by converting a digital file’s binary code of 0’s and 1’s into As, Cs, Gs and Ts, the basic elements of DNA. Customized DNA strands are chemically synthesized letter by letter to match the desired sequence.
The catalog instead uses a method called harmonic compilation, which the company likens to Gutenberg’s printing press. Similar to the way vowel letters can be arranged to form words, the catalog created an alphabet from pieces of DNA that could be assembled to represent bits. The company manufactures these DNA extracts en masse and then uses enzymes to encode the information into them. The cost of encoding the book with DNA and producing 1,000 copies is only thousands of dollars, said David Turek, the catalog’s chief technology officer.
“This is the case where you encode something in DNA once, and you can make as many replicas as you want using the tools of molecular biology,” he says. “It’s very easy to do in terms of volume.”
In 2023, French company Biomemory began offering a $1,000 DNA storage card that allows customers to store approximately one kilobyte of data, the equivalent of a short email, of their choice. At the time, CEO Irfan Arwani told WIRED that the show was an experiment to gauge consumer interest in storing DNA data. “We wanted to prove that our process is ready to show to the world,” he said.
However, the cards were expensive, because DNA synthesis is still a rather slow and expensive process. The catalog claims that its combinatorial approach is more efficient. Making identical copies of the same book also brought down the price.
After the catalog barcoded the molecules, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and shipped to France, where biostorage company Imagine packed the molecules into stainless steel capsules with an inert inner atmosphere, meaning there was no oxygen or moisture inside. In this case, the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.