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Using Bacterial DNA For Data Storage
NPV writes "January ACM Communications has an article on the use of DNA in genetically modified bacteria to store information. This is an attempt to achieve the ultimate in archival storage (one of the modified bacteria can tolerate 1000X more radiation than a human being). Now just suppose that the "junk DNA" in the human genome is the documentation package for the machine code. Who wrote that manual?" Here's the article abstract.
Just to be clear, no non-coding segments have been found in bacteria yet (last I heard). So putting data in as 'junk-DNA' in humans is quite a bit different from interrupting a fully functional bacterial DNA segment with the data to be stored.
Also note that the introns in eukaryotes are highly mutable (look up 'tandem repeats' if you have the inclination), so the fidelity of the data would be sacrificed by putting it there. The longest lifetime for the data would be achieved by tricking the replication machinery into thinking the segment was an exon, which would involve tying it to a functional protein that would be absent were the sequence to be mutated.
Duplication of the data would also work, but it would only hammer down the probability of mutation, since the probability of a point mutation of a base at the same location in two widely separated sequences is roughly 10^-18 to 10^-17 per year for exons.
I think that you may have your terms a little mixed up. An intron is the DNA between exons (coding regions) in a gene. i.e.
o n- --junk---junk---junk.
junk---junk---junk---exon-intron-exon-intron-ex
The junk DNA often referred to is mainly intergenic DNA, and this is where most of the non-coding DNA is found. This also makes up the majority of the eukaryotic genome. Prokaryotes (bacteria) do contain intergenic DNA, but no introns.