• Question: Have you ever heard of DNA data storage? If so, can you tell me how will it work, like how do you translate computer language data to DNA (ACGT) data? How do you actually make the DNA and how do you store the chromosomes?

    Asked by Lang to Ben, Lizzie, Francis, Max, Sian on 8 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Sian Richardson

      Sian Richardson answered on 8 Mar 2018:


      Hi Lang, that’s a great questions. I actually hadn’t head of this before, so thanks for introducing me to this concept. Current DNA codes for amino acids, in sets of 3 DNA bases make up the 20 amino acids (eg ATT – isoleucine, TGT – cysteine) Therefore I assume the principle is the same, that sets of DNA which code for different letter or numbers or whatever you want it to be. Current coding used 0 and 1 whereas DNA has 4 bases A, T, G, C therefore you could convert that sequence into 0 and 1s. DNA can be synthesised in a lab and long term storage of it would need to be chilled or frozen. So it would take a lot of maintenance to keep your data in this way but the pros is that it takes up less space than current methods.

    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 9 Mar 2018:


      Hey Lang. COOL question! I think DNA data storage is the future. Maybe you could work on it one day?

      DNA is a really stable way of storing information. We have extracted DNA from woolly mammoths which died 60,000 years ago – I don’t think a USB stick would last that long! And we’ll always have the technology to read and write DNA because it’s found in every single one of our cells.

      Like Sian said, DNA is a long series of letters – ACGT. Different scientists have come up with different ways of converting those letters into computer language, just like any other programming language.

      I used to work at a DNA synthesis company. We made really long stretches of DNA (ACGT, thousands of times over) and one of the reasons we did this was to store data. You could store ALL the data in the world (the whole internet and more) in about a spoonful of DNA, so it’s very space-efficient. But at the moment, transferring data to and from DNA is much slower than when you save a file on your hard-drive. I think this will all change in ten or twenty years…

    • Photo: Ben Mulhearn

      Ben Mulhearn answered on 14 Mar 2018:


      THis is a cool question, and it;s been aswered really well by Sian and Max 🙂

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