Deep Purple song now one for the ages

A famous rock song has been successfully stored in DNA.

In 2013 a recording of rock band Deep Purple performing its iconic song “Smoke on the Water” at the Montreux Jazz Festival became part of the first audiovisual archive in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

Now the recording has made history again. It is one of the first items from the Memory of the World archive to be stored in the form of DNA and then played back with 100% accuracy. The project was a joint effort between the University of Washington, Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, a San Francisco-based DNA manufacturing company.

Many pundits predict it is just a matter of time till DNA pips magnetic tape as the ultimate way to store data. DNA is compact, efficient and resilient. After all, it has been tweaked over billions of years into the perfect repository for genetic information. It will never become obsolete, because as long as there is life on Earth we will be interested in decoding DNA.

So how did the scientists turn a song into a molecule in the first place? First, the digital music file was translated from a series of 1s and 0s into the letters of the DNA alphabet, the bases A,C, T and G – for example, 00 for A, 01 for C, 10 for T and 11 for G. Then the sequences of letters were assembled into short DNA phrases with indexing information added to keep it all in the right order. Using these coding sequences, the DNA was manufactured letter by letter with chemical reactions, and then stored in a test tube.

To retrieve the information, the DNA was run through a sequencing machine to read the exact order of the DNA bases. It was then decoded to produce the original binary data. Finally it was played to an audience of hyper-picky Deep Purple fans, who were unable to pick any errors.