European Molecular Biology Laboratory Assigned Patent

European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, has been assigned a patent (10,387,301) developed by Goldman, Nick, Royston, Great Britain, and Birney, John, London, Great Britain, for a “high-capacity storage of digital information in DNA.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method for storage of an item of information, (210) is disclosed. The method comprises encoding bytes, (720) in the item of information, 210, and representing using a schema the encoded bytes by a DNA nucleotide to produce a DNA sequence, (230). The DNA sequence, (230) is broken into a plurality of overlapping DNA segments, (240) and indexing information, (250) added to the plurality of DNA segments. Finally, the plurality of DNA segments, (240) is synthesized, (790) and stored, (795).”

The patent application was filed on November 30, 2014 (14/556,213).