DNA Hard Drives

DNA is a digital medium. It is a sequence of discrete alphabet of 4 letters, instead of zeros and ones like in your computers or cellphones. If we could manipulate that DNA, we could put a message in it. We could use DNA to store information in a much more efficient way than we do today. This presentation by Nick Goldman from the European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK, explains how.
Storing DNA information on DNA is pretty simple: it is done in nature anyway. But could we store ANY information on DNA ? That was the purpose of the experiment. Opportunities are enormous: one petabytes can be stored in a tube the size of a human finger. But challenges are great too: the code has to be divided to many fragments, residing each in a different DNA molecule.

Presented by Nick Goldman in the World Economic Forum