as rate With the rise of artificial intelligence and the exponential growth of human data creation, scientists have been interested in DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature's way of storing data. It encodes genetic information and determines the blueprint for every living thing on Earth.

And DNA is at least 1,000 times more compact than SSDs. To demonstrate its compactness, researchers have previously encoded 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, 52 pages of Mozart's music, and an episode of the Netflix show "Biohackers" into tiny amounts of DNA.

But these are research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn't quite mainstream yet, but it may be getting closer. Now you can buy what may be the first business book written in DNA. Today, Asimov Press launches an anthology of biotechnology essays and science fiction stories encoded by strands of DNA. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book as well as a nucleic acid version—a metal capsule filled with dried DNA.

To encode the book in DNA, Asimov Press partnered with Boston-based company Catalog, which created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the book's 240 pages, representing 481,280 bytes data.

Traditional DNA data storage works by converting a digital file's binary code of 0s and 1s into As, Cs, Gs, and Ts—the building blocks of DNA. Custom DNA strands are chemically synthesized letter by letter to match the desired sequence.

Catalog uses a method called combinatorial assembly, which the company likens to Gutenberg's printing press. Similar to how movable letters are arranged to form words, Catalog creates an alphabet of DNA segments that can be assembled to represent bits. The company mass-produces these DNA fragments and then uses enzymes to encode information into them. David Turek, Catalog's chief technology officer, said it would cost only a few thousand dollars to encode the book into DNA and produce 1,000 copies.

"In this case, you encode it once in the DNA and then use the tools of molecular biology to make any number of copies," he said. "It's fairly easy to do that in large quantities."

In 2023, French company Biomemory began offering a $1,000 DNA memory card that allows customers to store about 1 kilobyte of data, equivalent to a brief email of their choice. At the time, CEO Erfane Arwani told Wired that the product was an experiment designed to gauge consumer interest in DNA data storage. "We want to show that our process is ready to be shown to the world," he said.

These cards are expensive, though, because synthesizing DNA is still a fairly slow and expensive process. Catalog claims its combined approach is more effective. Making identical copies of the same book also reduces the price.

After the Catalog is encoded, the DNA molecules are dried into powder and shipped to France, where biostorage company Imagene packages the molecules into stainless steel capsules with an inert gas inside, meaning there is no oxygen or moisture inside. In this state, the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.