Microsoft claims DNA storage breakthrough

DNA storage could offer a 'datacentre in a sugar cube', claims Microsoft

Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington say they are in the early stages of research into storing data in molecular DNA strands. The scientists claim that so far they have managed to squeeze 200MB of data into synthetic DNA.

While that's not a huge amount by today's standards, the space it occupies is much smaller than the tip of a pencil, meaning that whole films could be encoded onto almost microscopic objects in the future.

"Think of the amount of data in a big data centre compressed into a few sugar cubes. Or all the publicly accessible data on the internet slipped into a shoebox. That is the promise of DNA storage once scientists are able to scale the technology and overcome a series of technical hurdles," claimed Microsoft.

Research into DNA storage technology is progressing quickly, according to Microsoft, which claimed that researchers have increased the storage capability in synthetic DNA by a factor of 1,000 in the past year alone. They have also boosted decoding and encoding speeds by using computer science principles, such as error correction.

Furthermore, they claim that DNA storage ought to last a lot longer than traditional disk and SSD storage.

However, coding data onto DNA is a complex process. Simply put, the binary data is translated from zeroes and ones into the 'letters' of the four basic structural units, or nucleotide bases, that make up DNA. These are adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, and they effectively hold together the double helix structure of DNA.

A partner company, Twist Bioscience, then translates these letters into custom strings of DNA. To read the data, it's extracted using the polymerase chain reaction technique, usually employed by molecular biologists to manipulate DNA and decode the genomes of plants and animals.

This amplifies the data-holding strands and increases their concentration. The data can then be sequenced or decoded into binary code and run through error-correction computations. We don't blame you if that gives you a headache.

DNA storage certainly looks like it has some serious potential, and with all manner of things being done in the chip world, including the use of graphene to make superfast chips, the future of computing looks harder, stronger, smaller and faster.