Researchers store petabits of data with DNA

August 21, 2012

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Using DNA as a storage device, Harvard researchers managed to store one million gigabits of data per cubic millimeter.

Biology’s databank, DNA has long tantalized researchers with its potential as a storage medium: fantastically dense, stable, energy efficient and proven to work over a timespan of some 3.5 billion years. While not the first project to demonstrate the potential of DNA storage, Church’s team married next-generation sequencing technology with a novel strategy to encode 1,000 times the largest amount of data previously stored in DNA.

So does this qualify as big data or super tiny data?

[via @jakeporway]