What animal did scientists store an image of in DNA?

DNA could have more of a use case than just being the backbone of all living things (as if that wasn’t enough already). Scientists have known for years that DNA could store seriously vast amounts of data in a very, very small space. But figuring out how to do so at scale has been a sticking point for just as long.

Recent findings published in Nature, however, have brought us one step closer. The team was able to successfully store an image of a Chinese rubbing (at a size of 16,833 bits) and a panda (sized 252,504 bits) in DNA and then retrieve them without error. This was done in a new method from previous studies that was able to encode nearly 300,000 bits with 350 bits written per reaction, and it was done by 60 volunteers who had no professional experience working in a biology lab.

“Our strategy has the potential to be orders of magnitudes cheaper and faster than the mainstream method,” said Long Qian, a researcher at Peking University and co-author of the paper. “This could make DNA storage commercially viable.”

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