Running out of space on your phone? Don’t upgrade your cloud-storage subscription just yet. Scientists in China have discovered that images, text files and other digital data can be stored in strands of DNA fused to a 330-foot-long (100 meters) plastic strip capable of holding the equivalent of 3 billion songs.
It’s a far cry from a device that Microsoft built in 2016, which managed to squeeze 200 megabytes of data into a dab of DNA “much smaller than the tip of a pencil.”
DNA is a long, double-helical molecule made from a unique sequence of four chemical bases — adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) — that together encode the genetic information of an organism. Similarly, every digital file is ultimately a combination of 1s and 0s that a computer can interpret as a PDF, JPEG or other file type.
If each base were to represent a specific pattern of 0s and 1s, then a piece of artificial DNA could be encoded to contain the binary code for digital files. This type of molecule does not come from a living organism, but is assembled in the lab by linking pre-manufactured nucleotide building blocks together in the desired sequence.
This is what the scientists did before printing the encoded DNA on a long piece of tape. A solution containing the strands was passed over the strip so they adsorbed to the polymer surface.
“DNA has the potential to become the next-generation information storage medium due to its high storage density,” the authors wrote in the study. “The rolled configuration of the DNA tape efficiently maximizes the spatial utilization of the material, enabling portability and extending the number of available areas and storage capacity by increasing its length.”
Each section of the tape is printed with a barcode indicating which file is held there. A camera on the cassette-player-like machine then scans the tape as it moves between its two rollers, locates a file and dips that spot into a basic solution that releases the DNA. The DNA can then be sequenced, and that sequence of bases can be translated into the file’s code.
Data storage for hundreds — if not thousands — of years
The researchers hope their DNA tape could offer a solution to the proliferation of digital data, which has been exacerbated massively by the generative artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They estimate that a piece roughly 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) long could hold up to 362,000 terabytes of data — the equivalent of about 60 billion photos. For reference, laptops often ship with between 0.5 and 2TB of storage, while smartphones usually have a minimum of 128GB or 256GB.
Beyond the high storage capacity, the data the DNA tape encapsulates could be preserved for a long time, the team said. That’s because the DNA strands are stored inside metal organic frameworks (MOFs) — molecular-scale cages made of zinc ions — that provide a layer of protection.
DNA is known to keep its form for centuries, and the researchers found that their tape could store data for more than 345 years at room temperature, or about 20,000 years at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Even in the event of breakage, the DNA tape could be fixed using transparent adhesive tape, they said in the study.
In addition to identifying and extracting DNA strands that correspond to a specific file, the reader can encapsulate new DNA strands in MOFs and deposit them onto the tape. It can also autonomously detect when a DNA strand is in the wrong barcoded section and move it to the correct one.
While DNA data storage has been explored extensively over the years, this is one of the first solutions to show elegant “file system” behavior, meaning that files can be retrieved, modified or deleted. It also works robotically, instead of requiring a combination of manual and instrument steps, and can handle “warm” (repeatedly accessed) data as well as “cold” (rarely accessed) data.
However, challenges remain. The actual synthesis of DNA is still costly and time-consuming, and it requires bulky equipment. Plus, the process of recovering a single file from the tape takes about 25 minutes. Therefore, in its current state, the DNA cassette player doesn’t offer a feasible method of archiving our digital data.
That being said, the scientists hope that their research could lead to technology that can store huge amounts of both warm and cold data in a compact form, reducing reliance on the massive data centers in use today.
