Jocelyn Timperley in BBC:
“You know you’re a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge.”
At her home in Paris, Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, holds up a tiny vial to her laptop camera for me to see on our video call. It’s hard to make out, but she tells me that I should be able to see a mostly clear, light film on the bottom of the vial – this is the DNA. But this DNA is special. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. “That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds,” says Zielinski.
Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies.
More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Tom Brennen)