Synthetic DNA for Data Storage—Tantalizing but Pricey, Not yet Practical

Synthetic DNA is looking increasingly promising as a compact means for storing and retrieving different types of data, including text and images, according to Luis Ceze and Georg Seelig at the University of Washington, Doug Carmean and Karin Strauss of Microsoft Research, also in Seattle, and their collaborators. Their approach to exploiting DNA for data storage offers improved “controllable redundancy, reliability, and [information-storage] density” over previous attempts and is one of the first systems that uses DNA molecules to store digital images and retrieve them intact, they say. Details were presented last April in Atlanta during the annual Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (https://homes.cs.washington.edu/luisceze/publications/dnastorage-asplos16.pdf).