as rate As humanity's data generation has increased exponentially with the rise of AI, scientists have been interested in DNA as a way to store digital informationAfter 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 a solid-state hard drive. To demonstrate how researchers have previously compacted All 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets encoded, 52 pages of music by mozartAnd An episode of the Netflix show “Biohackers” Small amounts of DNA.
But these were research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn't exactly mainstream yet, but it may be getting closer. You can now buy the first commercially available book written in DNA. Today, Asimov Press Began an anthology of biotechnology essays and science fiction stories encoded in chains 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, representing 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 compares to the Gutenberg printing press. Just as dynamic letters can be arranged to form words, the catalog created an alphabet of DNA fragments that can be assembled to represent bits. The company creates those DNA snippets en masse and then uses enzymes to encode information in them. David Turek, the catalog's chief technology officer, said it cost at least thousands of dollars to encode the book in DNA and make 1,000 copies.
“This is 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 much easier to do it in volume.”
In 2023, French company BioMemory launches an offering $1,000 DNA storage card This allows customers to store approximately one kilobyte of data of their choice, which is equivalent to 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 demonstrate that our process is ready to show to the world,” he said.
However, the cards were expensive, as synthesizing DNA was still a fairly slow and expensive process. The catalog claims its combined approach is more efficient. Making identical copies of the same book also reduced the price.
After encoding by Catalog, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and shipped to France, where biological storage firm Imagine packed the molecules in stainless steel capsules with an inert internal environment, meaning there is no oxygen or gas inside. There is no moisture. In this state the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.