DNA ‘printing press’ could quickly store mountains of data

For decades, we have been told that organic/biological data storage could take over current hardware based data storage any time soon.

"... Now, researchers report applying the concept of movable type at the molecular level to dramatically speed up the ability to encode data in strands of DNA, an incredibly high-density medium for storing information. Although only demonstrated in the lab so far, the new approach, reported today in Nature, could energize the emerging DNA data storage industry by making it cost effective to archive vital information for decades and beyond ...

The allure of DNA data storage is immense: A single gram of DNA can store up to 215 petabytes of data, enough to store 10 million hours of high-definition video. At that rate, a few pickup trucks worth of DNA could store all the data humanity has ever recorded. And unlike conventional electronic hard drives, which degrade in years or decades, DNA can last for millennia. ..."

From the abstract:

"DNA storage has shown potential to transcend current silicon-based data storage technologies in storage density, longevity and energy consumption. However, writing large-scale data directly into DNA sequences by de novo synthesis remains uneconomical in time and cost. We present an alternative, parallel strategy that enables the writing of arbitrary data on DNA using premade nucleic acids. Through self-assembly guided enzymatic methylation, epigenetic modifications, as information bits, can be introduced precisely onto universal DNA templates to enact molecular movable-type printing. By programming with a finite set of 700 DNA movable types and five templates, we achieved the synthesis-free writing of approximately 275,000 bits on an automated platform with 350 bits written per reaction. The data encoded in complex epigenetic patterns were retrieved high-throughput by nanopore sequencing, and algorithms were developed to finely resolve 240 modification patterns per sequencing reaction. With the epigenetic information bits framework, distributed and bespoke DNA storage was implemented by 60 volunteers lacking professional biolab experience. Our framework presents a new modality of DNA data storage that is parallel, programmable, stable and scalable. Such an unconventional modality opens up avenues towards practical data storage and dual-mode data functions in biomolecular systems."

DNA ‘printing press’ could quickly store mountains of data | Science | AAAS "Inspired by ancient invention of movable type, researchers use blocks of DNA to dramatically increase writing speed"

Parallel molecular data storage by printing epigenetic bits on DNA (open access)

Fig. 1: Schematics of the epi-bit DNA storage.