Researchers at Twist Bioscience successfully encoded two songs in DNA: Miles Davis "Tutu" and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” The company specializes in DNA synthesis and worked together with Microsoft and the University of Washington on this project. This technique of data storage is very promising because it allows for long-term archiving of storage. Most storage mediums can last only a few decades, but data embedded in synthetic DNA, under the right conditions, can be stored for hundreds or thousands of years, claim the Twist Bioscience team.
Encoding binary code into DNA requires a conversion between ones and zeros to the DNA language, represented by a sequence of four letters: A, C, T, and G.
“The amount of DNA used to store these songs is much smaller than one grain of sand,” said Karin Strauss, Ph.D., a senior researcher at Microsoft. “Amazingly, storing the entire six petabyte Montreux Jazz Festival’s collection would result in DNA smaller than one grain of rice.”
“With the unreliability of how archives are often stored, I sometimes worry that our future generations will be left without such access. I'm proud to know that the memory of this special place will never be lost.” - Said the jazz legend Quincy Jones.
It looks like in the near future digital technologies and biological research are going to merge, and maybe create a completely new way of processing and storing data. Can you imagine a blockchain running on synthetic DNA?
