Humanity is producing data at an unimaginable rate, to the point that storage technologies can’t keep up. Every five years, the amount of data we’re producing increases 10-fold, including photos and videos. Not all of it needs to be stored, but manufacturers of data storage aren’t making hard drives and flash chips fast enough to hold what we do want to keep. Since we’re not going to stop taking pictures and recording movies, we need to develop new ways to save them.
Over millennia, nature has evolved an incredible information storage medium – DNA. It evolved to store genetic information, blueprints for building proteins, but DNA can be used for many more purposes than just that. DNA is also much denser than modern storage media: The data on hundreds of thousands of DVDs could fit inside a matchbox-size package of DNA. DNA is also much more durable – lasting thousands of years – than today’s hard drives, which may last years or decades. And while hard drive formats and connection standards become obsolete, DNA never will, at least so long as there’s life.
The idea of storing digital data in DNA is several decades old, but recent work from Harvard and the European Bioinformatics Institute showed that progress in modern DNA manipulation methods could make it both possible and practical today. Many research groups, including at the ETH Zurich, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University are working on this problem. Our own group at the University of Washington and Microsoft holds the world record for the amount of data successfully stored in and retrieved from DNA – 200 megabytes.
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