Large-capacity DNA data storage is “closer than you think,” Slashdot wrote in 2019.
now IEEE spectrum An update on where we are now and where we're headed from participants in the DNA Storage Collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. will be delivered. . “Organizations around the world have already taken the first steps toward building DNA drives that can both write and read DNA data,” while “funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are devices that have invested in the necessary technology stack for the relevant field. ”
The challenge is learning how to get information into and out of molecules in an economically viable way… For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it will take about 2 gigabits per second. It must be possible to write, as demonstrated by the storage density of DNA data, which is approximately 2 billion bases per second. To put this into context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is only about 10 terabases per year. This equates to approximately 300,000 bases per second over the course of a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would have to grow by about four orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Meeting global storage demand will require an additional eight orders of magnitude improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scale-up before. The rapid growth of silicon-based technologies has led us to generate large amounts of data. A similar exponential growth will be the basis for the transition to DNA storage…
Companies such as DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies commercialize automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis in some applications in the biotechnology industry… [I]It won't be long before we can integrate the two technologies into one functional device. A semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (such as changes in pH) and an enzyme system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific substances. , which combines individual bases to build synthetic DNA strands. A team at the University of Washington and Microsoft, in collaboration with enzyme synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first steps toward this device…and the path is relatively clear. Building a commercially relevant DNA drive is a matter of time and money…
At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other applications, particularly in the biotechnology industry, thereby expanding our ability to reprogram life. In the future, if DNA drives achieve a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), the box will be able to synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improved knowledge of how to construct genomes with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a completely different world… microorganisms that produce chemicals and drugs. You will be able to produce plants. It can repel pests and sequester minerals such as arsenic, carbon, and gold from the environment. At a rate of 2 gigabases per second, it takes minutes to build up a biological countermeasure against a new pathogen. But so is building the genome of a new pathogen. In fact, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological means that all the security concerns of the IT world are brought into the biological world as well…
The future is built not from the DNA we find, but from the DNA we write.
This article makes an interesting point. Biological laboratories around the world are already ordering chemically synthesized ssDNA, “delivered in lengths up to a few hundred bases,” and are sequencing DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.
“In other words, we are already converting digital information to and from DNA, but usually only with sequences that make sense from a biological point of view.”