Shakespeare sonnets, photos stored on DNA

UK scientists encode poetry, prose, and a photo on DNA, unleashing a brave new world of data storage.

London: A genetic storage device has been used to "download" all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets on to strands of synthetic DNA.

British scientists were then able to decode the information and reproduce the words of the Bard with complete accuracy.

Dr. Nick Goldman of European Molecular Biology Laboratory examines synthesized DNA in an Eppendorf vial. AP
Dr. Nick Goldman of European Molecular Biology Laboratory examines synthesized DNA in an Eppendorf vial. AP Photo: AP

The same technique made it possible to store a 26 second excerpt from Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech and a photo of the Cambridgeshire laboratory where the work took place.

Researchers were also able to turn a copy of Watson and Crick's paper describing the nature of DNA into genetic code.

The landmark study paves the way to storing huge amounts of data using the same method evolved by Nature to write the "Book of Life".

Theoretically, 100 million hours of high definition video could be stored in a cupful of DNA - equivalent to every film and TV program ever created.


Unlike magnetic tape, which degrades within a decade, DNA is a hardy material that can last for tens of thousands of years. A DNA archive also requires no constant supply of electric power, as do hard disks.

For their experiment, the British scientists employed a California-based company to create strands of artificial DNA that corresponded to their coding instructions.

The end result was a small test-tube the size of a little finger containing a tiny amount of dry dusty material.

This was the DNA, which was then "read" and decoded to reproduce the original files.

Details of the technique are described today in the journal Nature.

Five genetic "letters" from the genetic code - A,C,G and T - were used to represent the noughts and ones that make up "bytes" of digital information.

For instance, the upper case T in the word Thou from the second line of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII - Thou art more lovely and more temperate - was encoded by the sequence TATAT.

Dr Nick Goldman, from the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, said: "We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths, which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it.




The scientists crossed a major hurdle by incorporating "error correction" similar to that found in devices such as laptops and mobile phones.

This involved overlapping short strands of DNA and independently writing every million-molecule fragment of code four times. Effectively, three back ups were created for each fragment, greatly reducing the chances of mistakes.

"You would have to have the same error on four different fragments for it to fail - and that would be very rare," said co-author Dr Ewan Birney, also from the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Currently the technology is restricted by the length of time it takes to sequence DNA and its high cost - around $US8000 ($A7610) per megabyte of stored material.

Even so, DNA-based storage could today be cost effective for archives of several megabytes over long time periods of 600 to 5000 years, computer models predict.

Ten years from now the rapid development of more efficient, cheaper DNA sequencing could make genetic storage a practical possibility for archive life spans of less than 50 years, say the scientists.

They stressed that the DNA used was wholly artificial and different to the genetic molecules of life.

"The DNA we've created cannot be incorporated accurately into the genome (genetic code)," said Dr Goldman. "It uses a completely different code."