Can DNA really be used to store data, and how much can it hold?

The answer

DNA data storage encodes digital information (0s and 1s) into the four nucleotide bases of DNA (A, T, G, C). A single gram of DNA can theoretically store 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) of data. In 2012, Harvard's George Church stored an entire book in DNA. By 2024, Microsoft and the University of Washington demonstrated an automated DNA storage system that could write and read data without human intervention. Catalog Technologies encoded the entirety of English Wikipedia (16 GB) into a DNA pellet smaller than a pencil eraser. The medium is remarkably durable: DNA recovered from 400,000-year-old fossils is still readable. Current limitations are speed and cost: writing costs approximately $800 per megabyte and reading requires hours of sequencing. However, costs are falling exponentially, similar to early computing. The technology is most promising for archival storage where data is written once and rarely accessed.