I was listening to a Science Friday podcast and one of the topics was about storing data using DNA. Both DNA computing and DNA storage has always fascinated me. As we all know, DNA has a very long shelf life! The half life of DNA has recently been estimated to be 521 years under certain conditions such as vacuum packed and at -80 degree Celsius. That would roughly translate to over a million years of shelf time before the DNA disintegrates into something that is no longer useful. Given what we have seen of the shelf lives of digital storage media such as CDs and DVDs, this sounds pretty good.

In addition, the “storage density” of DNA is very impressive! In a recent study, scientists from Columbia University reported that they have developed a method through which they can store 215 petabytes of data in just 1 gram of DNA. A petabyte is a mere million gigabytes and all of it in 1 gram of DNA. How impressive is that! If you are interested in an overview of some of the earlier studies on this subject, you might want to read this article.

OK, it stays for a long time and is very efficient in terms of capacity, so what’s the catch?

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