Using DNA to preserve data

Telegraph : Archivists are struggling over how to store the petabytes of digital information being generated by current technologies so that the data can be accessed and understood by future generations. Data recorded just decades ago on magnetic tape and other digital formats are becoming more difficult to access as the computer hardware and software needed to interpret them becomes obsolete, damaged, and irreplaceable. One solution, proposed by Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge, UK, is to use the ability of DNA to encode information. DNA has several advantages: It’s very dense; it’s three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional (like a hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable. Birney and Goldman, who have succeeded in storing two thousand million million bytes of data in a single gram of DNA, say that data should still be able to be accessed 10 millennia from now.