But who's gonna read it?

Natural History, May, 2007 by Stephan Reebs

Today's exploding volume of data resides on stacks of paper, reels of magnetic tape, piles of compact disks, or banks of silicon chips. But those media are fairly fragile and last, at most, a few thousand years. For truly long-term storage, something nearly indestructible is needed. A new study suggests an intriguing possibility: the DNA of bacteria.

Nozomu Yachie and his graduate adviser, Yoshiaki Ohashi, a molecular geneticist at Keio University in Tsuruoka, Japan, together with several colleagues, encoded the message "E=mc^2 1905!" in the DNA of Bacillus subtilis, a tough bacterium that lives in soil.

After assigning the letters and symbols to specific sets of DNA nucleotides, they prepared coded nucleotide sequences, which they inserted into the genomes of bacteria. A few days--and numerous bacterial generations--later, they extracted the DNA and decoded the sequences to read the message.

Certain bacteria, including B. subtilis, form resistant spores that can revive after millions of years of dormancy. And living bacterial populations can survive for eons, too. Of course, their DNA can mutate, but the Japanese team developed a simple way to encrypt and store redundant--yet distinct--versions of the data. As the technology for replicating and sequencing DNA becomes cheaper, faster, and more accessible, bacterial DNA might someday replace the silicon chip. (Biotechnology Progress)