Researchers have made history by storing archival-quality audio recordings in DNA for the first time. Twist Bioscience—a company that specializes in DNA synthesis—announced that it worked in conjunction with Microsoft and University of Washington researchers to encode two songs in DNA: Miles Davis’ “Tutu” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Both recordings were taken from the Montreux Jazz Festival archives. This is reportedly the first time DNA has been used for long-term archival-quality storage.
Quincy Jones, who has a long-standing association with the Montreaux Jazz Festival, endorsed this project in a statement. “With the unreliability of how archives are often stored, I sometimes worry that our future generations will be left without such access,” he said. “I'm proud to know that the memory of this special place will never be lost.”
The process of encoding archival recordings on DNA requires binary code to be converted into the language of DNA (sequences of A, C, T and G). “The amount of DNA used to store these songs is much smaller than one grain of sand,” said Karin Strauss, Ph.D., a senior researcher at Microsoft, in a statement. “Amazingly, storing the entire six petabyte Montreux Jazz Festival’s collection would result in DNA smaller than one grain of rice.”
The team behind the project argue that DNA is the future of digital storage, claiming that the majority of the world’s data is being stored using technology that won’t last longer than a few decades. “Where the very best conventional storage media may preserve their digital content for a hundred years under precise conditions, synthetic DNA preserves its information content for hundreds or thousands of years,” Twist Bioscience claims.
