In their paper, “Length-based Encoding of Binary Data in DNA,” published by the American Chemical Society last month, the researchers explained their system for encoding additional digital information within DNA. Read their paper here.

“What we developed at UCR is a method to encode a message in DNA in a way that does not require an expensive sequencing machine,” said Stefan Lonardi, a member of the UC-Riverside team. “The decoding still requires a wet lab procedure, but the experimental procedure is significantly easier.” Other UC-Riverside team members are Nathaniel G. Portney, Yonghui Wu and Mihri Ozkan

The team’s method relies on the length of the fragments -- rather than using the actual content of the nucleotide sequence.

The human genome is comprised of 22,000 genes and takes the equivalent of 750 megabytes of data. This data, researchers say, takes up only about 3% of the storage capacity of the DNA material. The remaining 97% of DNA material provides “plenty of room to encode information in a genome,” researchers say, and allows that information to be preserved and replicated in perpetuity.

To illustrate the basic science behind their finding, the UC-Riverside team posits the following:

Given the size of the DNA fragments (one base pair of DNA is 0.33 nanometers), one could store a large amount of information in a very small space. By storing messages within DNA, organizations can “tag” objects to verify authenticity, as well as to inconspicuously send data to a specific destination.

This isn’t as science-fiction as it might sound. “Already there are several companies using DNA to tag objects that they certify to be original and which then can be very difficult to counterfeit,” says Stefano Lonardi, Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering. He pointed to Redweb Security, a private firm in the U.K., which has developed ‘i-powder’ that tags DNA.