Microsoft: a step closer to storing data in DNA

The prospect of storing vast amounts of data in DNA is getting closer to reality thanks to a new data recovery technique. Microsoft is showing interest in synthetic DNA. The company is considering using it in the future as a storage medium that could solve the world's ever-growing need for data storage. Previous research has shown that just a few grams of DNA can store an exabyte of data and keep it intact for 2,000 years. The disadvantage is that the method is quite expensive and extremely slow. Writing data to DNA involves converting 0s and 1s into DNA molecules (adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine), while recovering data from DNA would involve decoding the files into 0s and 1s. Finding and retrieving specific files stored in DNA is also a huge challenge. As scientists from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington explain, without random access or the ability to selectively retrieve files from stored DNA, the entire data set would need to be decoded to find the files we want. Creating a random access would reduce the amount of processing that needs to be done for each search-find. So to achieve some random access to DNA, they created a library of “primers” that bind to each DNA sequence. The primers, along with a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), are used as targets to select the desired DNA fragments through a random access. “Before synthesizing the data from a file into DNA, the researchers added PCR primer targets from the primer library to both ends of each DNA sequence,” the University of Washington reports . “They then used these primers to select the desired point through some random access and used a new algorithm designed to more efficiently decode and restore the data to its original digital state.” The researchers also developed an algorithm to more efficiently decode and restore the data. Microsoft researcher Sergey Yekhanin said the new algorithms are more tolerant of errors when writing and reading DNA sequences, which reduces the processing and processing required to retrieve information. While this is not the first time random access to DNA has been achieved, it is the first time it has been done on such a scale, according to the researchers. The researchers encoded a 200MB data file containing 35 of the 29kB to 44MB files in synthetic DNA. The files contained video, audio, images and high-definition text. After the paper describing the technique was published, they encoded and retrieved 400MB of data files in DNA. The researchers believe that the random access approach they have used will scale to large DNA pools containing several terabytes each.

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