DNA Cassette Tape May Contain Every Song Known - And More

Computing

Technological Innovation Website Editorial Team - September 12, 2025

The DNA cassette tape resembles music cassette tapes. [Image: Jiankai Li et al. - 10.1126/sciadv.ady3406]

DNA Storage

No, cassette tapes, or K-7s, aren't experiencing the same renaissance as vinyl records, but scientists have used a similar principle to this 1960s magnetic storage medium to create a cutting-edge new technology that could record an unimaginable amount of data.

Instead of recording data magnetically onto your cassette tape, Jiankai Li and colleagues at Southeast University of Science and Technology in China are using "DNA bits."

DNA data storage is getting closer to the real world , with techniques now even available for solid-state genetic storage . And scientists working in this field seem to have a real penchant for retro-inspired writing—another team recently recorded data in DNA using movable type , the kind used in old-fashioned newspaper printing.

DNA data storage offers many advantages: A DNA file can be stored much more compactly, for example achieving a storage density unattainable with magnetic technologies - estimates indicate a storage capacity of 455 exabytes per gram of DNA.

The lifespan of data is also many times longer than any current technology, potentially lasting for centuries, and this emerging technology makes large, energy-hungry data centers obsolete.

Schematic of the DNA strand. [Image: Jiankai Li et al. - 10.1126/sciadv.ady3406]

DNA cassette tape

The new thing now consisted of placing the DNA bits on a plastic tape, and then rotating it for decoding, just as a cassette tape rotates so that a reading head can read its magnetic bits.

"We can design its sequence so that the order of DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer," summarized Professor Xingyu Jiang. This means it's possible to store any type of digital file, be it text, images, audio, or video.

To deposit DNA bits onto a plastic strip, they had to devise a way to protect the delicate molecules. The team solved this problem using zeolitic imidazolate, a type of porous ceramic that belongs to the family of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs .

This crystalline coating protects DNA molecules very effectively—the team estimates that their "crystalline armor" will keep DNA bits viable for centuries.

And the tape contains more than just bits of data: It also carries barcodes with each bit, making it much easier to decode - recovering the data recorded in DNA is one of the biggest challenges of this technology.

The DNA cassette tape won't play on a regular tape recorder. [Image: Jiankai Li et al. - 10.1126/sciadv.ady3406]

All songs ever recorded

The data density achieved is impressive: While a standard cassette tape can hold about 12 songs per side, 100 meters of the new DNA cassette tape can store over 3 billion songs, assuming an average of 10 megabytes per song. This is likely far greater than the total number of songs ever recorded—Spotify recently announced it had surpassed 100 million songs.

Thus, the total storage capacity of a single DNA cassette tape is 36 petabytes of data, equivalent to 36,000 one-terabyte hard drives.

"We developed a compact DNA cassette tape drive and verified its functionality by randomly depositing incomplete images into the data partition, demonstrating a fully automated closed-loop operation involving addressing, retrieval, removal, subsequent file deposit, and file retrieval, all accomplished within 50 minutes.

"Finally, the complete picture is restored by next-generation sequencing and decoding. The DNA cassette offers a strategy for rapid, compact, and large-scale storage of DNA-based data, hot or cold," the team concluded.

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