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Storing Data In Bacteria DNA?

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Science, Technology

Yes, organic storage. This has the potential to be huge but there’s still a long, long, long way to go yet.

From the AP:

The four characters that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much like digital data. Character combinations can stand for specific letters and symbols � so codes in genomes can be translated, or read, to produce music, text, video and other content.

While ink may fade and computers may crash, bacterial information lasts as long as a species stays alive � possibly a mind-boggling million years � according to Professor Masaru Tomita, who heads the team of researchers at Keio University.

Tomita’s team successfully inserted into a common bacterium Albert Einstein’s famous “E equals MC squared” equation and “1905,” the year the Nobel Prize-winning physicist published the special theory of relativity.

Gives a whole new meaning to a computer virus. Yeah, yeah, I know bacteria and viruses are different, but how long before they figure out a way to store data in viruses too?


This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 and is filed under Science, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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