Scientists have long seen because of its atomic size, stability and its lifespan of thousands of years. The Harvard researchers were able to boost the data capacity of previous attempts by 1,000 times.

"Most non-DNA methods store on a plane, while DNA can be stored in the volume (beaker). The density is remarkably high - as little as one bit per base, one base per cubit nanometer. So we can store on the order of almost a zetabyte in a gram of DNA - a millimeter volume," Church added.

Last year, Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced that to carry more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence.

The Japanese universities said they successfully encoded "e= mc2 1905!" -- Einstein's theory of relativity and the year he enunciated it -- on common soil bacteria Bacillius subtilis.

The Harvard researchers used the four DNA nucleobases - adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) - as binary markers. The A and C stand for the digit 0 and the T and G represent the digit 1, according to Kosuri.