{"id":5586,"date":"2012-10-05T10:34:30","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T17:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=5586"},"modified":"2012-10-05T10:34:30","modified_gmt":"2012-10-05T17:34:30","slug":"print-in-dn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/print-in-dn","title":{"rendered":"Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Regenesis-Synthetic-Biology-Reinvent-Ourselves\/dp\/0465021751?tag=lifeboatfound-20\">Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves<\/a>. It\u2019s written by Harvard biologist <a href=\"http:\/\/arep.med.harvard.edu\/gmc\/\">George Church<\/a> and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don\u2019t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/early\/2012\/08\/15\/science.1226355.abstract\">created<\/a> 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf\u2019s and pixels, he\u2019s used DNA.<\/p>\n<p>Much as pdf\u2019s are built on a digital system of 1s and 0s, DNA is a string of nucleotides, which can be one of four different types. Church and his colleagues turned his whole book\u2013including illustrations\u2013into a 5.27 MB file\u2013which they then translated into a sequence of DNA. They stored the DNA on a chip and then sequenced it to read the text. The book is broken up into little chunks of DNA, each of which has a portion of the book itself as well as an address to indicate where it should go. They recovered the book with only 10 wrong bits out of 5.27 million. Using standard DNA-copying methods, they duplicated the DNA into 70 billion copies.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists have stored little pieces of information in DNA before, but Church\u2019s book is about 1,000 times bigger. I doubt anyone would buy a DNA edition of <em>Regenesis <\/em>on Amazon, since they\u2019d need some expensive equipment and a lot of time to translate it into a format our brains can comprehend. But the costs are crashing, and DNA is a far more stable medium than that hard drive on your desk that you\u2019re waiting to die. In fact, <em>Regenesis<\/em> could endure for centuries in its genetic form. Perhaps librarians of the future will need to get a degree in biology\u2026<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/early\/2012\/08\/15\/science.1226355.abstract\">Link to Church\u2019s paper<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/loom\/2012\/08\/16\/want-to-get-70-billion-copies-of-your-book-in-print-print-it-in-dna\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It\u2019s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":234,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,19,20,41,42],"tags":[701,703,702],"class_list":["post-5586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-futurism","category-information-science","category-media-arts","tag-dna-tag","tag-media","tag-recording"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}