how much memory can DNA store and how it is stored

How Much Information is Stored in the Human DNA?

Forget hard disks or DVDs. If you want to store vast amounts of information look instead to DNA, the molecule of which genes are made. Scientists in the UK have stored about a megabyte's worth of text, images and speech into a speck of DNA and then retrieved that data back almost faultlessly. They say that a larger-scale version of the technology could provide an extremely dense and long-lived form of digital storage that is particularly well suited to data archiving.

Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored. 

 The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

structures that are organized from DNA and protein. A DNA molecule consists of two strands that form the iconic double-helix “twisted ladder”, whose backbone, which made of sugar and phosphate molecules, is connected by rungs of nitrogen-containing bases. DNA is composed of 4 different bases: Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Cytosine (C), and Guanine (G).  These bases are always paired in such a way that Adenine connects to Thymine, and Cytosine connects to Guanine.  These pairings produce 4 different base pair possibilities: A-T, T-A, G-C, and C-G. The haploid human genome (containing only 1 copy of each chromosome) consists of roughly 3 billion of these base pairs grouped into 23 chromosomes. A human being inherits two sets of genomes (one from each parent), and thus two sets of chromosomes, for a total of 46 chromosomes, representing the diploid genome, which contains about 6×10^9 base pairs.

1.5 Gbytes x 100 trillion cells = 150 trillion Gbytes or 150×10^12 x 10^9 bytes = 150 Zettabytes (10^21)!!!

 

 It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely…