Stefan Mileschin

Looks like we aren't in Kansas any more

A team of boffins at the University of Texas at Austin have stuffed a copy of the Wizard of Oz onto a strand of DNA.

The boffins wanted to prove that DNA was millions of times more efficient at storing data than your laptop's magnetic hard drive and can store data far more densely than silicon. Apparenlty you could put the entire internet inside just a few grams of it.

In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ilya Finkelstein, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and company detail their new error correction method.

They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz, translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We're on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are certainly not the first to have encoded a work of art onto strands of DNA... [A] team of researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington fitted 200 megabytes of data onto lengths of DNA, including the entirety of War and Peace. In March 2019, they even came up with the first automated system for storing and retrieving data in the manufactured genetic material. Today, other major technology firms are also working in the space, including both IBM and Google.

https://fudzilla.com/news/51239-dna-...e-wizard-of-oz