Shakespeare's sonnets encoded in DNA
of years, and make sense of it," said Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI.
"It's also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy," Goldman said in a statement.
Reading DNA is fairly straightforward, but writing it has until now been a major hurdle to making DNA storage a reality.
The new method required synthesising DNA from the encoded information which was done by a California-based company.
"We downloaded the files from the Web and used them to synthesise hundreds of thousands of pieces of DNA - the result looks like a tiny piece of dust," Emily Leproust of Agilent Technologies said.
Agilent mailed the sample to EMBL-EBI, where the researchers were able to sequence the DNA and decode the files without errors.
"We've created a code that's error tolerant using a molecular form we know will last in the right conditions for 10 000 years, or possibly longer.
"As long as someone knows what the code is, you will be able to read it back if you have a machine that can read DNA," said Goldman.
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