The genome of common bacteria can now preserve data! The technique of adding artificial DNA with encoded information was developed at the Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus.
So, you can now afford to forget those USB flash memory “thumb drives”, which are small compared to this new data storage device. Surprisingly, each organism is capable of attaching up to 100 bits of data. Scientists successfully encoded and attached the phrase “e=mc2 1905″ to the DNA of bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacteria.
As an early use, this technique can be used to create special markers for identifying legitimate versions of pharmaceuticals. The bacillus makes itself an ideal archival storage system, by creating new copies of the data itself every time it reproduces.
