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As is the rate of humanity’s data creation increases exponentially with the rise of AI, scientists are 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 determines the plan of every living thing on earth.
And DNA is at least 1,000 times more compact than solid state hard drives. To show how compact, researchers have first encoded all 154 sonnets of Shakespeare, 52 pages of Mozart’s musicand an episode of the Netflix show “Biohackers” in tiny amounts of DNA.
But these were research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn’t exactly mainstream, but it could be getting close. Now you can buy what may be the first commercially available book written in DNA. Today, Asimov Press debuted an anthology of biotechnological essays and science fiction stories encoded in strands of DNA. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book plus the nucleic acid version—a metal capsule filled with dried DNA.
To encode the book in DNA, Asimov Press worked with the Boston company Catalog, which created about 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 the binary code of a digital file 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 Gutenberg’s printing press. Similar to how movable letters can be arranged to form words, the Catalog has created an alphabet of pieces of DNA that can be assembled to represent bits. The company manufactures these snippets of DNA in bulk and then uses enzymes to encode the information in them. David Turek, the Catalog’s chief technology officer, said it would cost a few thousand dollars to encode the book into DNA and make 1,000 copies.
“This is a case where you code something into DNA once and you can make as many copies as you want using the tools of molecular biology,” he says. “It’s pretty easy to do this in volume.”
In 2023, the French company Biomemory began to offer a $1,000 DNA storage card which allows customers to store about one kilobyte of data, equivalent to a short email, of their choice. At the time, CEO Erfane Arwani told WIRED that the offering was an experiment to gauge consumer interest in DNA data storage. “We wanted to show that our process is ready to be shown to the world,” he said.
The cards were expensive, however, because DNA synthesis is still a fairly slow and expensive process. Catalog claims that its combinatory approach is more effective. Making identical copies of the same book also raised the price.
After the catalog did the coding, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and shipped to France, where the biological storage company Imagene packed the molecules in stainless steel capsules with an inert internal atmosphere, which means that there is neither oxygen nor moisture inside. In this state, the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.
