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Researchers just figured out how to squeeze 200 MB of data onto some strands of DNA.

That's right, the same stuff that's inside all of us, the blueprints for our eye color, ear shape, height and more -- all that makes you, you -- also happens to be a pretty decent medium for storing the same kind of information you put on a traditional USB memory stick.

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Microsoft and the University of Washington announced the storage breakthrough on Thursday, reporting that they had managed to store a 2010, high definition OK Go music video (see below) as well as 100 books and Crop Trust's seed database on some DNA strands. Storing data on synthetic DNA is not new, but 200 MB is a huge leap from the most recent DNA storage record of just 22 MB.

"It's a thousand times bigger than we had done last year. Just demonstrating that we can scale our methods... was really important," said lead researcher Luis Ceze, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.

Researchers believe that DNA storage's incredibly compact nature and durability (it can hold information for thousands of years) could solve many of the world's long-term, data-storage problems. 

That bit of DNA, which stored the video, art, books, a database and more, is smaller than the tip of a pencil. Compared to current storage technologies, DNA storage is incredibly dense. "A billion gigabytes fit in a one-inch cube, which is very small," said Karin Strauss, a researcher with Microsoft Research.

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To understand how the scientists melded digital data with biology, you have to know a little bit about DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Every strand of DNA is made up of a repeating pattern of four chemical bases: Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G) and Thymine (T).

To make the data compatible with DNA, the researchers had to convert the 1s and 0s of traditional data into those letters: ACGT. The next part sounds a bit like science fiction, as the team employed a third-party company, Twist Bioscience, to convert this newly mapped data into synthetic DNA, which they sent them back as a test tube full of dry DNA data.

Ceze agrees that it sounds like science fiction, but it's actually pretty straight forward. "DNA is already an information storage module. Nature uses it to store information about a living system's genes. We're just mapping a different kind of info into DNA," he said.

Storing the data is nice, but totally useless if you can't play back that awesome OK Go video. 

UW Associate Professor Luis Henrique Ceze, in blue, and research scientist Lee Organick prepare DNA containing digital data for sequencing, which allows them to "read" and retrieve the original files.Credit: Tara Brown Photography/University of Washington

To make the data readable, researchers started with a DNA manipulation technique known as polymerase chain reaction, which amplifies DNA strands for other research. That enabled them to take a sample, amplify it and resequence the DNA, convert it back into bits and read it into specially coded RAM.

It's a fairly convoluted process, but Strauss and Ceze believe a DNA storage future is within reach. "We see no limitations in the physics," Strauss said.

"As a university researcher, looking at trends … and potential of the market … I think we could be able to see this affecting people’s lives within a decade,"Ceze added.

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