DNA storage has been talked about for years, but how close is it to becoming a reality?

HardwareStorageDNA storage has been talked about for years, but how close is it to becoming a reality?When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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DNA strands

Chris Szewczyk, Hardware Writer(Image credit: Chris Szewczyk)This week I’ve been testing a weird Asus RTX 4060 Ti:One with a built in SSD slot! I’ve also been gaming on a BenQ 240Hz Fast TN esport monitor. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

Chris Szewczyk, Hardware Writer

(Image credit: Chris Szewczyk)This week I’ve been testing a weird Asus RTX 4060 Ti:One with a built in SSD slot! I’ve also been gaming on a BenQ 240Hz Fast TN esport monitor. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

(Image credit: Chris Szewczyk)

Chris Szewczyk

This week I’ve been testing a weird Asus RTX 4060 Ti:One with a built in SSD slot! I’ve also been gaming on a BenQ 240Hz Fast TN esport monitor. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

Obviously, that means there’s a need for a lot of devices to store it all. Those devices are typically made up of hard drives, solid state drives, or even tape drives. Such solutions are becoming inefficient in terms of power usage, heat generation, and physical size, however, so a new solution is needed. And one of the more promising ones in the pipeline is not electronic, but biological. I’m talking about DNA based storage.

DNA storage is the process of storing traditional binary data inside synthesized strands of DNA. Put simply, it’s possible to convert binary data into the cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A) or thymine (T) nucleotides.

Storing data in DNA has several advantages. Firstly, DNA is very stable. If stored properly, it could last for millions, if not billions of years. That’s a lot longer than your typical mechanical hard drive which you might expect to last for five to ten years or so before it needs to be replaced. DNA itself has been around for billions of years, so it’s not the kind of thing that will go obsolete, either.

Longevity and physical footprint are two reasons that make DNA storage an attractive solution, but there are two major technical challenges to overcome. Current DNA storage demonstration methods involve chemical synthesizing, which is inefficient. There will need to be some kind of semiconductor that can read and write enzymes.

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One of the more famous examples of a DNA storage demonstration took place at the 2015 World Economic Forum. The co-author of a 2013 paper on DNA storage handed out tubes of DNA that included the private key of onebitcoin. The first to decode the DNA would win the coin.

It took three years, but the challenge was completed when Sander Wuyts, a Belgian PhD student, accessed the key. They summed up their methods in a blog post titledFrom DNA to Bitcoin.

(Image credit: Biomemory)

Biomemory DNA drive

(Image credit: DNA Script)

DNA Script’s automatic DNA printer

DNA Scriptis one company that’s built a commercially available automatic DNA synthesis device. It doesn’t rely on toxic chemical reagents that are commonly used for DNA synthesis. Of course it’s one thing to build a DNA synthesis machine, but integrating it into a system with automated read and write capabilities, at scale and efficiently is something that may take decades to realize. That’s even if it happens at all. Some other long-term cost effective storage technology may come along that makes DNA storage moot.

But one step at a time. The first mechanical hard drive was released in 1956. The IBM 350 was the size of a large wardrobe and stored 3.75MB. Look how far the humble HDD has come in the decades since.

It’s becoming apparent that something needs to be done to satiate the voracious appetite for global data storage, and done fast. It’s easy enough to just build new data centers packed with various drives, but that’s not practical or viable in the longer term. DNA could well be the answer, especially if the field is given the attention and funding it requires. The challenges are many, but not insurmountable.

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