In a couple of decades from now, your version of the Bible or
Harry Potter (or the best-selling book of the 22nd century,
whatever that might be) might just be stored in a small vial of
liquid or on small chips. Harvard University researchers have
just encoded a book in DNA fragments instead of on physical copy
or e-copy. The Alphabets of DNA DNA is made up of building
blocks called nucleotides, similar to how the English alphabet
is made up of building blocks called alphabets. In the language
of DNA, there are just 4 alphabets instead of 26, ‘A’, ‘T’, ‘G’
and ‘C’. Moving to information theory, each letter in DNA can
thus encode 2 bits of information. Each nucleotide weighs around
250 Dalton (each Dalton weighs 1.66×10-24g). Thus, a single gram
of single-stranded DNA could encode 455 exabytes (1 exabyte is
1018 bytes) of information. The previous sentence says ‘single-
stranded’ because in nature, DNA molecules form two strands that
wrap around each other to form a helix. Even keeping in mind
this condition, a