dnabin 🧬

A command-line tool for encoding binary data to DNA sequences and decoding DNA sequences back to binary data.

I took inspiration from this video by ScienceClic for this project: How to store data in DNA?

Overview

dnabin converts binary files into DNA sequences using a simple 2-bit (binary) encoding scheme where each byte is represented by 4 DNA bases (quaternary):

• A = 00
• C = 01
• G = 10
• T = 11

This encoding allows any binary data to be represented as a DNA sequence, which can be useful for data storage in synthetic DNA.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Golang

Build from source

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/chamorin/dnabin
cd dnabin

# Install dependencies
make deps

# Build the binary
make build

# The binary will be available at bin/dnabin

Usage

Usage:
  dnabin [command]

Available Commands:
  decode      Decode DNA sequence to binary
  encode      Encode binary file to DNA sequence
  help        Help about any command

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for dnabin

Encode binary data to DNA sequence

# Encode a file and output to stdout
dnabin encode input.bin

# Encode a file and save to output file
dnabin encode input.bin -o output

You can also use the -c or --color flag to colorize the DNA bases in the output (A=green, C=blue, G=yellow, T=red):

dnabin encode input.bin -c

Decode DNA sequence to binary

# Decode a DNA sequence and output to stdout
dnabin decode input.txt

# Decode a DNA sequence and save to output file
dnabin decode input.txt -o output.bin

Encoding Details

Each byte is encoded as 4 DNA bases by splitting it into 4 pairs of bits:

Byte Value	Binary	DNA Sequence
0	00000000	AAAA
255	11111111	TTTT

DNA sequences can contain whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) which are ignored during decoding.