Researchers store computer operating system and short movie on DNA, by Phys.org. Scientists and engineers have created the highest-density data-storage device ever — using DNA, with 215 petabytes of data stored error free, copy-able, and recoverable and on a single gram of DNA.

Yaniv Erlich, a computer science professor at Columbia Engineering, and his colleague Dina Zielinski, … chose six files to encode, or write, into DNA: a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, “Arrival of a train at La Ciotat,” a $50 Amazon gift card, a computer virus, a Pioneer plaque and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon.

They … mapped the ones and zeros … to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C and T. In all, they generated a digital list of 72,000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long, and sent it in a text file to a San Francisco DNA-synthesis startup, Twist Bioscience, that specializes in turning digital data into biological data. Two weeks later, they received a vial holding a speck of DNA molecules.

To retrieve their files, they used modern sequencing technology to read the DNA strands, followed by software to translate the genetic code back into binary. They recovered their files with zero errors, the study reports. (In this short demo, Erlich opens his archived operating system on a virtual machine and plays a game of Minesweeper to celebrate.)

They also demonstrated that a virtually unlimited number of copies of the files could be created with their coding technique by multiplying their DNA sample through polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and that those copies, and even copies of their copies, and so on, could be recovered error-free.

The implications:

Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature’s age-old solution for information-storage—DNA. …

DNA is an ideal storage medium because it’s ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from the bones of a 430,000-year-old human ancestor found in a cave in Spain.

“DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs …,” said Yaniv Erlich.

hat-tip byrmol