Our genes can come in handy when trying to store digital information. This isn’t genetic memory, but actually turning DNA molecules into data storage units. A group of researchers from the University of Washington (UW) teamed up with Microsoft experts to address space containment issues for digital data, because in just four years the amount of all of the world’s data will reach 44-trillion gigabytes.

Solutions? We could either build six stacks of computer servers that would reach up to the moon (over 370,000 kilometers) or alternatively try to store all of this data in DNA molecules. The latter option would save a ton of space, both in the digital and geographic sense of this term.

Scientists at UW came up with a new technology that would allow to “successfully encode four image files worth of digital data into the nucleotide sequences of snippets of synthetic DNA,” Tech Times reported.

It seems surreal, but researchers retrieved the right sequences of encoded digital data from a DNA pool and reconstructed the four images without losing an information byte, the source said.


Comment: Scientists were able to encode four digital images into strings of DNA. This required converting the 1s and 0s of the files into the four basic elements of DNA – adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. But even more challenging was reversing the process without any errors.

​”Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works — it’s very, very compact and very durable,” said Luis Ceze, one of the scientists who worked on the project, as cited by Science Alert. In the future giant server farms will not have to be built to store data, with DNA data coding, billions of gigabytes could be squashed into a space the size of an apple.