A team of Harvard researchers, led by George Church, Sriram Kosuri and Yuan Gao, have managed to cram a whopping 704-terabytes of data onto a single gram of DNA – made possible by stuffing “96 bits into a DNA strand by treating each base (A, C, G, T) as though it’s a binary value.” Continue reading for a video and more information.
Caveats? The processing time is currently too slow for time-sensitive content, and cells with living DNA would destroy the strands too quickly to make them viable for anything more than just transfers. All the same, such density and a lifespan of eons could have us turning to DNA storage not just for personal backups, but for backing up humanity’s collective knowledge.
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