Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Like rate Humanity’s creation of information is increasing exponentially with the rise of artificial intelligence, scientists wonder DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing information. It encodes the genetic information and determines the blueprint for every living thing on earth.
And DNA is at least 1000 times more compact than solid-state hard drives. To demonstrate how compact researchers used to be He encoded all 154 sonnets of Shakespeare, 52 pages of Mozart’s musicand An episode of the Netflix show Biohackers a small amount is converted into DNA.
But these were research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn’t quite mainstream yet, but it could be getting closer. Now you can buy the first commercial book written on DNA. today, Asimov Press debuted an anthology of biotechnology essays 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 Boston-based Catalog, which created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the book’s 240 pages, representing 481,280 bytes of information.
Traditional DNA data storage works by converting the binary code of 0s and 1s of a digital file into As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, the building blocks of DNA. Specific DNA strands are chemically synthesized letter by letter to match the desired sequence.
Instead, the catalog uses a method called combinatorial assembly, which the company likens to a Gutenberg printing press. Similar to how movable letters can be arranged to form words, Catalog created an alphabet of pieces of DNA that can be assembled to represent bits. The company mass-produces those pieces of DNA and then uses enzymes to encode information into them. David Turek, the catalog’s chief technology officer, said it cost thousands of dollars to encode the book in DNA and make 1,000 copies.
“It’s a situation where you encode something in DNA once and you can make as many replicates as you want using the tools of molecular biology,” he says. “It’s pretty easy to do in volume.”
In 2023, the French company Biomemory began offering it A $1,000 DNA memory card this allows customers to store about one kilobyte of data, the equivalent of a short email of their choice. At the time, CEO Erfane Arwani told WIRED that the proposal was a test to gauge consumer interest in DNA data storage. “We wanted to demonstrate that our process is ready to be demonstrated to the world.”
The cards were expensive because DNA synthesis is still a fairly slow and expensive process. The catalog claims that its combinatorial approach is more efficient. The production of identical copies of the same book also lowered the price.
After cataloging, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and shipped to France, where biological storage firm Imagene packaged the molecules in stainless steel capsules with an inert internal atmosphere, meaning no oxygen or moisture inside. In this case, the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.
