“What you’re offering by [encoding digital data as DNA] inside the cell is the machinery the cell has to protect its DNA.”
–
Harris Wang, system biologist at Columbia University, on successfully inserting binary code for “hello world!” into the DNA of living E. coli bacteria using CRISPR. In their
paper, Wang and team claim that, compared to other DNA-based data-storage methods that rely on in vitro synthesis, in-cell encoding can maintain information over many generations in natural open environments.
