Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times. The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0). To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses. Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage. It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival. Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored. Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though… well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!) It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely… http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...rams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram
An important thing to note is there is storage but processing the data would be much more complicated. It's going to be awhile until we can easily store our documents in DNA that is able to be overwritten and copied from one medium to an other, at least as far as I understand it this method is read-only. The copied the same book by the millions to achieve the Terabit capacity also, so I'd imagine that if you were to use multiple file types and such that the rate of failure to view or access the data would be significantly more difficult. Still, this is a remarkable feat! Imagine, someday could have a contact lenses that stores all of our media, it's personal and close to you so it's hard to steal easily, the storage is huge too. There's so many things you can do with DNA storage.
I wouldn't call it read-only, I would call it long-term archival. You wouldn't be reading from a storage medium like that except to copy it over to a random access drive for use. The operation time is on the scale of hours; it's more suited for leaving in a container in a basement for years and years, serving as a backup archive. It's not adequate for carrying on your person until gene sequencers become much, much faster. I also wouldn't think it would be stored on part of your body. You would just lose it that way, or get it confused with your own DNA. It could be stored on a small device. I wonder why they decided to convert the base-4 DNA bases into base-2 binary. Maybe because they wanted both helices of the DNA to be read identically?