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Francie Diep , InnovationNewsDaily

Bioengineers have turned a book into DNA. The researchers also have shown they can decode the DNA to re-create the book, which includes 53,426 words, 11 images and one interactive Javascript app.

This may be the world's only modern biology book that costs thousands of dollars to read as well as write.

The new bio-digital book, coded from a Harvard University researcher's writings on synthetic biology, represents the largest amount ofdata ever written into DNA. Because of how costly and complex it is to read and write genetic material, DNA is still far from a practical storage drive. Yet as the price of synthesizing and sequencing DNA continues to drop, it may become an interesting way of storing data for the very long term, said Sriram Kosuri, a Harvard bioengineer who was one of the bio-digital book's creators.

"It brings a different perspective into the storage field," Kosuri told InnovationNewsDaily.

"At this point, it's very premature to hope that it would actually become something practical," said Stefano Lonardi, a computational biologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not part of the Harvard effort. Nevertheless, Lonardi said, the work is a step toward DNA storage in the future. "These are things that people have to do first in order to get to something practical," he said.

Turning an e-book into DNATo turn text and pictures into a double helix, the book had to undergo several translations. First, Kosuri and his colleagues wrote an HTML file of a draft of the book that Harvard bioengineer George Church was writing at the time. HTML is the language Web developers use to write websites.

The biologists then turned the HTML into binary, the 1s and 0s that computers read. They decided to use the individual building blocks of DNA, commonly referred to by their one-letter initials, to represent the 1s and 0s. The building blocks A and C would represent 0s, they decided, while G and T would represent 1s. They then assembled strands of DNA representing their binary code. [10 Technologies Poised to Transform our World]

One of the greatest challenges of building DNA from scratch is that it's expensive and difficult to create long, unbroken strings of the stuff. So Kosuri and his teammates decided they would make very many smaller pieces instead, tagging each piece with an address so that someone trying to read the strands would be able to put them in the correct order. Such pieces are easy for the latest DNA-reading technology, callednext-generation sequencing, to process.

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Book converted to DNA then 'read' to show off bio-digital storage