DNA stores data in bits after epigenetic upgrade

‘Bricks’ of DNA, some of which have chemical tags, could one day be an alternative to storing information electronically.

Originally published By Heidi Ledford at Nature, on 23 October 2024

Chemical markers attached to pre-fabricated units of DNA can easily encode data. Credit: Nobeastsofierce/SPL

DNA has been humanity’s go-to data repository for millennia. Tough and compact, it is so information-dense that just one gram of it can hold enough data for 10 million hours of high-definition video.

But there is always room for improvement.

An innovative method now allows DNA to store information as a binary code — the same strings of 0s and 1s used by standard computers. That could one day be cheaper and faster than encoding information in the sequence of the building blocks that make up DNA, which is the method used by cells and by most efforts to harness DNA for storing artificially generated data.

The method is so straightforward that 60 volunteers from a variety of backgrounds were able to use it to store the text of their choice. Many of them initially didn’t think the technique would work, says Long Qian, a computational synthetic biologist at Peking University in Beijing and an author of the study1 describing the technique.

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