Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge, were pondering what they could do with the torrent of genomic data their research group generates, all of which has to be archived. Then they got an idea: store the data in DNA.
The concept has been proven to work, although it is very expensive today. With use, the cost is expected to drop to a few pennies. Modern digital storage technologies tend to come and go. For instance, the laser disc was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. However, equipment to read that information is no longer available, except perhaps on eBy and at garage sales. But, says Dr Goldman, DNA has endured for more than 3 billion years. So long as life, and biologists, endure, someone should know how to read it.
You can read the full story, including details of the method of calculating the data, in an article in The Economist at http://goo.gl/5vzQR.
My thanks to newsletter reader Leslie Tomlinson for telling me about this story.
