An Entire Book Was Written in DNA—and You Can Buy It for $60

as rate As the rise of AI accelerates humanity’s creation of data, scientists are intrigued DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing information. It encodes genetic information and determines the blueprint for every living thing on Earth.

And DNA is at least 1,000 times more compact than solid-state hard drives. To demonstrate exactly how compact, researchers have done before All of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are encoded, 52 pages of Mozart’s musicAnd An episode of the Netflix show “Biohackers”. A small amount of DNA.

But these were research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn’t exactly mainstream yet, but it could be getting closer. Now you can buy what is the first commercially available book written on DNA. today, Asimov Press A collection of biotechnology essays and science fiction stories encoded in strands of DNA has debuted. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book and the nucleic acid version—a metal capsule full of dried DNA.

To encode the book into DNA, Asimov Press worked with the Boston-based company Catalogue, which created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the book’s 240 pages, representing 481,280 bytes of data.

Traditional DNA data storage works by converting a digital file’s binary code of 0s and 1s into As, Cs, Gs, and Ts—the building blocks of DNA. Custom DNA strands are chemically synthesized by characters to match the desired sequence.

The catalog instead uses a method called combinatorial assembly, which the company compares to the Gutenberg printing press. Similar to how moving letters can be arranged to form words, the catalog has created an alphabet of DNA fragments that can be combined to represent bits. The company mass-produced those DNA snippets and then used enzymes to encode information into them. David Turek, the catalog’s chief technology officer, said it cost thousands of dollars to encode the book into DNA and produce 1,000 copies.

“It’s a case where you encode something in DNA once and make as many copies as you want using the tools of molecular biology,” he says. “It’s fairly easy to do in volume.”

In 2023, the French company BioMemory launched an offering $1,000 DNA storage card This allows customers to store about one kilobyte of data equivalent to a small email of their choice. At the time, CEO Erfane Arwani told Wired that the offering was an experiment to gauge consumer interest in DNA data storage. “We wanted to demonstrate that our process is ready to be shown to the world,” he said.

The cards were expensive, though, because DNA synthesis was still a fairly slow and expensive process. Catalog claims that its combined approach is more efficient. Making identical copies of the same book also keeps costs down.

After encoding the catalog, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and shipped to France, where biological storage firm Imagen packaged the molecules in stainless steel capsules with an inert internal atmosphere, meaning no oxygen or moisture inside. In this state, the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.