You might be familiar with hard drives as a way to store your data, but did you know that

DNA can store digital information in its own way?

DNA has string of letters, A, C, T, and G.

So you just go letter by letter and convert that into these digits.

It's Monday, September 9th, and this is Science Friday.

I'm SciFi Radio Fellow Valeria Diaz. Each one of our cells contains the equivalent of about a gigabyte of DNA data.

And with an estimated 30 trillion about a gigabyte of DNA data.

And with an estimated 30 trillion cells in our bodies,

all that DNA adds up to roughly 30 trillion gigabytes of storage.

That's enough to encode about one-fifth of all the data in the world today.

In recent years, researchers have developed technologies that tap into DNA storage capabilities.

And now, researchers are going beyond storage and using DNA as the basis for computers.

Here's Cyfri guest host Sophie Bushwick with more.

I'm joined by two professors from North Carolina State University's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular

engineering. Dr. Albert Young and Dr Orlin Fellev. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Sophie, for having us. It is a pleasure to be on this very interesting

discussion. Thanks and how does DNA store information? The simplest way to think about it would be DNA has is a string of letters, A, C, T, and G. And so you can have any length string of letters that you want and you can have many of these strings.

The simplest way to convert the letters into binary or zeros and ones would be an A could be a

zero zero, a T could be a zero one, a G could be a one zero and a C could be a one one.

And so you just go letter by letter and convert that into these digits.

And what about if you want to go beyond storage and use DNA to process information as well?

How does that work?

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