Scientists Can Now Store Digital Images in DNA

And, they can retrieve the images perfectly!

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the molecule that stores the biological information and genetic instructions of every single species on the planet. Now, a team of scientists have figured how to store digital images in DNA.

Scientists from the University of Washington, working alongside engineers from Microsoft, have developed the first complete system to encode, store, and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules.

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In a recent paper on their findings, the researchers outlined one of their experiments in which they successfully encoded four digital image files into DNA. This required converting the binary numbers — the 1s and 0s of the image files — into nucleotide sequences — stretches of adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. The paper also described that the team could reverse the process, retrieving information from the nucleotide sequences back into the binary information of the four image files, without any mistakes.

"How you go from ones and zeroes to As, Gs, Cs and Ts really matters because if you use a smart approach, you can make it very dense and you don't get a lot of errors," explained one of the researchers, Georg Seelig, in a media release. "If you do it wrong, you get a lot of mistakes."

Earlier this year, scientists at the University of Southampton made an unprecedented step forward in data storage, when they develop a device capable of storing 360 terabytes of data for 13.8 billion years.

The latest DNA storage technique could have real potential for securely archiving large amounts of data, adding to the latest trends in digital information storage capable of lasting for thousands of years.

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"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 one of the co-authors, Luis Ceze, in a statement. "We're essentially repurposing it to store digital data — pictures, videos, documents — in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years."

"This is an example where we're borrowing something from nature — DNA — to store information," Ceze added. "But we're using something we know from computers — how to correct memory errors — and applying that back to nature."

Their findings have been presented at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Atlanta, Georgia.

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