We all got used to USBs, Hard-drives, SSDs, Cloud and many more ways to store our data. But what if there is a better way, all around us?
Plants have some of the largest genomes in nature and in many cases most of it is non-functional, hence the addition of large fragments of DNA into their genome should not affect the plant growth and appearance. Of all plants, trees can be the ideal mean to store information for a long time since they last for a long time and require minimal handling.
Plants have some of the largest genomes in the world. For example, wheat genome is more than five time bigger than the human genome - about 17 Gb. Pine trees have 22 Gb of DNA “letters” in their genome.
Most of the DNA in these plants (up to 80%) has no known function. Plants can cope very well with the addition of large DNA fragments. Thus, plants may be the ideal organism to store large amount of data as DNA sequences in their genome.
Transforming data coding DNA into trees genomes would be a self-maintenance, long lasting, eco-friendly new way of storing information.