DNA cassette tape can store every song ever recorded
DNA cassette looks like music cassettes
Jiankai Li et al. 2025
Retro cassettes can make a return, with a touch of DNA. While DNA has been used as a means of storing information before, the researchers have now combined this with the convenience and appearance of a cassette from the 1980s, creating what they call a DNA cassette.
Xingyu Jiang at the University of the South Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on a plastic strip. “We can design his sequence so that the order of DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, as are 0 and 1 in a computer,” he said. This means that it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video.
A problem with previous DNA storage techniques is the difficulty of access to the data, so the team then superimposed a series of bar codes on the band to help recovery. “This process amounts to finding a book in the library,” says Jiang. “We must first find the shelf corresponding to the book, then find the book on the corresponding shelf.”
The band is also covered with what researchers describe as a “crystalline armor” made of zeolitic imidazolate, which prevents DNA bonds from decomposing. This means that the cassette could store data for centuries without deteriorating.
While a traditional cassette could boast about 12 songs on each side, 100 meters from the new DNA cassette can contain more than 3 billion pieces of music, 10 mega -centers per song. The total data storage capacity is 36 data petacts – equivalent to 36,000 hard -teraoctet discs.
However, says the member of the team, Jiankai Li, also at the University of Sciences and Technologies of the South, if you put one of the new bands in an old -fashioned Walkman, he will not produce any significant sound, because the DNA cassette does not use the magnetic signals of his predecessor.
“Our strip carries DNA molecules,” explains Li. “In other words, it would be like trying to play a photo in a downside – the formats are incompatible.”
Subjects:
