as the rate With the advent of artificial intelligence, human data production increases exponentially, scientists have become interested in 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 1000 times more compact than solid state hard drives. To show just how compact it is, researchers have already encoded all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 52 pages of Mozart’s music and an episode of the Netflix show “Biohackers” into tiny 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. Now you can buy what may be the first commercially available book written with DNA. Today, Asimov Press released an anthology of biotech and science fiction articles encoded in strands of DNA. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book along with a copy of the nucleic acid—a metal capsule filled with dried DNA.
To encode the book in DNA, Asimov Press worked with the Boston-based catalog company, which created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the 240 pages in the book, representing 481,280 bytes of data.
Traditional DNA data storage works by converting a digital file’s binary code from 0s and 1s to As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, which are 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 composite montage, which the company likens to Gutenberg’s printing press. Similar to how movable letters are arranged to form words, the alphabet catalog created DNA fragments that can be assembled to represent bits. The company mass-produces those pieces of DNA and then uses enzymes to encode information in them. It costs thousands of dollars to encode a book into DNA and produce 1,000 copies, said David Turk, the catalog’s chief technology officer.
“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. you want to make This is relatively easy to do in volume.
In 2023, the 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 choosing. At the time, WIRED CEO Irfanah Arwani said the offer was a test to gauge consumer interest in DNA data storage. “We wanted to show that our process is ready to show to the world,” he said.
However, the cards were expensive, as DNA synthesis is still a relatively slow and expensive process. Catalog claims that its hybrid approach is more efficient. Making similar copies of the same book also lowered the price.
After cataloging the coding, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and shipped to France, where the biostorage company Imagene packaged the molecules in stainless steel capsules with an inert interior, meaning no oxygen inside. or there is no moisture. In this case, the DNA inside it can be preserved for thousands of years.
