Breakthrough Achieved in DNA Storage!

Researchers have discovered a way to significantly speed up the process of data storage in DNA, making it a more efficient and affordable solution for long-term data storage.

“It’s a really nice proof of concept and a significant improvement over previous DNA data storage approaches,” says Kun Zhang, a genomics expert at Altos Labs. “It gets around a barrier of DNA data storage that requires synthesizing DNA from scratch,” adds Jeff Nivala, a biophysicist at the University of Washington.

Today, the fastest DNA writers synthesize about 320 million bytes of DNA data daily. At this speed, it would take 2 million years to write a single gram’s work of DNA. To speed things up – 350 times faster! – the concept of movable types, or porcelain letters, has been applied to a molecular level. As a single gram of DNA can store up to 215 petabytes of data – enough to store 10 million hours of high-definition video – DNA data storage shows enormous potential. Unlike conventional electronic hard drives, DNA can last for millennia. Writing data costs about $0.003 per bit, and a commercialized operation would reduce costs by using fewer reagents. A commercial version of the new approach could allow for writing up to 2 terabytes daily, a 6000-fold increase over today’s best commercial DNA synthesizers.