DNA 'perfect for digital storage'

23 January 2013 Last updated at 13:03 ET By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data.

The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".

The information was then read back out with 100% accuracy.

It is possible to store huge volumes of data in DNA for thousands of years, the researchers write in Nature magazine.

They acknowledge that the costs involved in synthesizing the molecule in the lab make this type of information storage "breathtakingly expensive" at the moment, but argue that newer, faster technologies will soon make it much more affordable, especially for long-term archiving.

"One of the great properties of DNA is that you don't need any electricity to store it," explained team-member Dr Ewan Birney from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, near Cambridge.

"If you keep it cold, dry and dark - DNA lasts for a very long time. We know that because we routinely sequence woolly mammoth DNA that is kept by chance in those sorts of conditions." Mammoth remains are many thousands of years old.

The group cites government and historical records as examples of data that could benefit from the molecular storage option.

Much of this information is not required every day but still needs to be kept. Once encoded in DNA, it could be put away safely in a vault until it was needed.

Read the rest here:
DNA 'perfect for digital storage'