Storing data in DNA is no longer a science fiction technology, and although there are still many years of research and development before commercial solutions arrive, the goal is closer thanks to the advances that scientists are making.

In case you are not familiar with this type of technology, say that it is a type of biological storage that it treats DNA like any other digital storage device. “Simply” instead of binary data that is encoded as magnetic regions on a hard disk platter or SSD flash memory, there are synthesized DNA strands that store 96 bits, where each of the bases (TGAC) represents a binary value (T and G = 1 , A and C = 0).

The potential outcome is outside any rational parameters because theoretically one gram of DNA can contain a staggering amount 215,000 Tbytes of digital information.

Data storage in DNA, closer

Another advance comes from Peking University and three other institutions, which was published in Nature and it promises to be a faster and cheaper way store data in DNA. It should be noted that conventional methods for encoding data into DNA strands involve creating custom DNA sequences from scratch. Scientists call this process de novo synthesis. This technique is laborious, slow, expensive, and error-prone.

These researchers’ proposal describes a clever alternative: using naturally occurring DNA methylation to rewrite DNA strands instead of creating new ones. Methylation is part of the epigenetic modification of DNA that occurs during the life of an organism rather than over generations. Scientists basically used it, “imprint” new data into existing DNA.

Scientists have designed 700 different “mobile-type” DNA components from nucleic acids. With them, they can write data manually or automatically by methylating specific points on existing DNA strands and mutating “epi-bits” to encode information. For us laymen to understand the scope of this investigation, they say this Progress is comparable to writing a book with a word processor instead of a hammer and chisel as our ancestors did.

First successful tests

The team tested their method by encoding images such as a Chinese tiger (16,833 bits) and a panda (252,504 bits) at about 350 bits per response. This speed is Ice slow compared to even the slowest HDDbut it is still a big improvement over de novo synthesis. Additionally, since this technique reuses existing DNA rather than synthesizing new strands, access is theoretically much cheaper.

The researchers also created an easy-to-use DNA storage app called iDNAdrive that makes the process accessible to non-scientists. Sixty volunteers with no biotechnology training manually coded approximately 5,000 bits of text data using the software. Another benefit of the app is that it increases the availability of DNA storage outside of laboratories.

“Now, as DNA data storage enters the early stages of commercialization, the epi-bit framework demonstrates possible directions in parallel molecular information storage with ready modularity.”the researchers said.

The race to make DNA storage systems a commercial reality is on, especially at a time when Data centers consume more and more energy. The DNAMIC project (DNA microfactory for autonomous archiving), directed by the Lithuanian company Genomika and co-financed by the European Union, is one of the most interesting projects, promising “store all the world’s data in a small box”. All in theory, because practice is much more complicated.