Future of Storage: 100 Million Hours of HD video in Every Cup

DNA, the genetic material that holds all the information needed to make plants and animals, and now some scientists are saying it could help handle the growing storage needs of today's information society, according to a new study released in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Researchers aren't using DNA from any living organism, or one that was once alive; instead, they are synthesizing it.

A team of British researchers has used DNA - the genetic building blocks of life - to record Shakespeare's sonnets and excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

The experiment, along with another published late last year, shows that what we think about as life's alphabet can also be used to preserve our greatest creations, perhaps for thousands or tens of thousands of years.

"We're using DNA here as a chemical molecule of storage. It just happens to be the same molecule that is used in our bodies as well," said Ewan Birney, senior author of the study and geneticist at the United Kingdom's European Bioinformatics Institute.

"The idea that DNA, which people think of as a biological molecule, can be used as a physical storage tape in a non-biological function is pretty incredible," said Drew Endy, a Stanford University bioengineer who was not involved in the work.

"It's a really nice example of how a fundamental investment in a basic scientific tool can lead to (amazing things)."

The authors argue convincingly that the technique could eventually be scaled up to create a storage capacity far beyond all the digital information stored globally today (somewhere in the vicinity of 1 zettabyte or 1015 megabytes). For example, EMBL-EBI's official press release claims that more than 100 million hours of high-definition video could be stored in roughly a cup of DNA.