Researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Centre have stored a computer operating system, a short movie along with other data in DNA.
Study showed an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone could unlock DNA's nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides.
DNA is an ideal storage medium because it is ultracompact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from the bones of a 430,000-year-old human ancestor found in a cave in Spain.
DNA won't degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won't become obsolete.
Researchers chose six files to encode, or write, into DNA:- an operating system,
- an 1895 French film "Arrival of a train at La Ciotat",
- a US$50 Amazon gift card, a computer virus,
- a Pioneer plaque and
- a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon.
They compressed the files into a master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code made up of ones and zeros.
Using an erasure-correcting algorithm called fountain codes, they randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, and mapped the ones and zeros in each droplet to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C and T.
The algorithm deleted letter combinations known to create errors and added a barcode to each droplet to help reassemble the files later.
The researchers showed that their coding strategy packed 215 petabytes of data on a single gram of DNA, which was the highest-density data-storage device ever created.
