In a simple proof-of-concept test, the team successfully encoded the word “hello” in snippets of fabricated DNA and converted it back to digital data using a fully automated end-to-end system, which is described in a new paper published March 21 in Nature Scientific Reports.
DNA can store digital information in a space that is orders of magnitude smaller than datacenters use today.
It’s one promising solution for storing the exploding amount of data the world generates each day, from business records and cute animal videos to medical scans and images from outer space.
Microsoft is exploring ways to close a looming gap between the amount of data we are producing that needs to be preserved and our capacity to store it.
That includes developing algorithms and molecular computing technologies to encode and retrieve data in fabricated DNA, which could fit all the information currently stored in a warehouse-sized datacenter into a space roughly the size of a few board game dice.
“Our ultimate goal is to put a system into production that, to the end user, looks very much like any other cloud storage service — bits are sent to a datacenter and stored there and then they just appear when the customer wants them,” said Microsoft principal researcher Karin Strauss.
“To do that, we needed to prove that this is practical from an automation perspective.”
Information is stored in synthetic DNA molecules created in a lab, not DNA from humans or other living things, and can be encrypted before it is sent to the system.
While sophisticated machines such as synthesizers and sequencers already perform key parts of the process, many of the intermediate steps until now have required manual labor in the research lab.
But that wouldn’t be viable in a commercial setting, said Chris Takahashi, senior research scientist at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
“You can’t have a bunch of people running around a datacenter with pipettes — it’s too prone to human error, it’s too costly and the footprint would be too large,” Takahashi said.
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