Microsoft is reportedly investigating the use of Synthetic DNA to store thousands of data files far more rapidly than conventional hard or solid state disks.
Question: what’s the most effective means of storing information? If you immediately thought of your trusty Seagate external hard drive, you’d be wrong. The correct answer is actually DNA, and tech giant Microsoft is investigating the use of synthetic DNA to store its data files.
The Redmond company has purchased 10 million long oligonucleotides (DNA molecules for the rest of us) from Twist Bioscience, a startup in San Francisco, according to Engadget.
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IEEE reports that Microsoft has begun trialling synthetic DNA as a storage option by converting data files into nucleotides – the building blocks of DNA. Twist Bioscience created 10 million synthetic DNA strands with sequences provided by Microsoft.
While Twist Bioscience doesn’t actually have access to the data, the successful conversion of data into synthetic DNA could revolutionise how we store our files and digital memories in the future.
Human DNA already plays host to massive amounts of genetic data, and tech researchers posit that synthetic DNA could be used to store digital files in far more rapid way that what conventional hard or solid state disks presently allow.
One of Microsoft’s partner architects, Doug Carmean, stated that early trials of the conversion process revealed that Microsoft “could encode and recover 100 percent of the digital data from synthetic DNA.”
Despite this, Carmean reports that Microsoft has a very long way to go before releasing any form of commercial product.
Should Microsoft be able to make use of DNA in as conventional means as flash storage allows, the company could potentially store 704 terabytes of information within a single gram of DNA.
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Source: Engadget
