Catalog launches first commercial DNA-encoded book

DNA-based storage platform provider Catalog Technologies claims that its tech, which uses parallelization, minimal energy, and a low physical footprint, offers an alternative to established data management systems, and has now delivered the first commercially available book encoded into DNA using its technology.

The Catalog Asimov DNA book
The Catalog Asimov DNA book

A traditional printed book, available from Asimov Press, includes a DNA capsule provided by Catalog, and retails for $60 as a bundle. In keeping with the spirit of science, the book features nine essays and three works of science fiction.

Catalog, founded in 2016 by MIT scientists, created around 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the 240 pages of the book, representing 481,280 bytes of data. After being converted into synthetic DNA, it was stored as a dry powder under inert gas to eliminate moisture and oxygen in the capsule.

Hyunjun Park, Catalog
Hyunjun Park

The production of the capsules involved two other companies in the process. Catalog synthesized and assembled the millions of nucleotides of DNA into thousands of individual strands in their Boston laboratories. That DNA was then shipped to France, where Imagene packaged the molecules into laser-sealed, stainless steel capsules. Finally, Plasmidsaurus “read” the DNA book at their headquarters in California and submitted the final sequence of it.

“Providing 1,000 copies of this latest Asimov book encoded into DNA is a significant milestone as we commercialize our DNA storage and computation technology,” said Hyunjun Park, co-founder and CEO of Catalog. “Our DNA platform – which uses very little energy – is quickly becoming an attractive option as emerging workloads, including AI, require unsustainable amounts of energy to process.”

While this is the first commercially available DNA book, it’s not the first DNA book. George Church’s Regenesis, which he co-authored with Ed Regis, was published in 2012. Church’s Harvard laboratory used binary code to preserve the book (including images and formatting), before converting that binary code into physical DNA.

Shortly after, a group of Cambridge scientists encoded Shakespeare’s entire collection of 154 sonnets – as well as an audio file of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech – into DNA.

Catalog's DNA capsules
Catalog’s DNA capsules

In 2022, Catalog encoded eight of Shakespeare’s tragedies, comprising more than 200,000 words of text, into a single test tube. It also built and tested methods to search that DNA.

Various new forms of DNA data storage technologies have been reported by Blocks & Files recently, including here, and here.