While practical DNA storage remains elusive, a team of Chinese researchers has developed a DNA cassette tape that could theoretically store every music track ever recorded. Xingyu...
Although it’s correct that it’s a tape held in a cassette, it’s not like an audio tape that you can record over. You take the files you want to save and encode them as lots and lots of oligonucleotides (300 base pairs or so). The tape itself is printed with barcodes, and the DNA is applied in encapsulated form onto the areas between the stripes of the barcode.
The barcodes are used for addressing - now you can quickly spool your tape to the place where the DNA is, extract some of it, and sequence it to retrieve your file.
Reading a file would take almost an hour.
Still impressive technology, but I find the comparison with magnetic cassette tapes somewhat misleading.
For any of you who want more than just the headline: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady3406
Although it’s correct that it’s a tape held in a cassette, it’s not like an audio tape that you can record over. You take the files you want to save and encode them as lots and lots of oligonucleotides (300 base pairs or so). The tape itself is printed with barcodes, and the DNA is applied in encapsulated form onto the areas between the stripes of the barcode.
The barcodes are used for addressing - now you can quickly spool your tape to the place where the DNA is, extract some of it, and sequence it to retrieve your file.
Reading a file would take almost an hour.
Still impressive technology, but I find the comparison with magnetic cassette tapes somewhat misleading.