Could DNA be the cheaper and high-capacity version of data storage?

Changing trends in data storage is forcing the IT executives how they store data and applications. It is estimated that by 2040, the planet would exceed the supply of microchip-grade silicon by 100 times. To prevent such crisis, IT professionals and researchers have been exploring a storage material that life itself relies on DNA. Amazing!

Theoretically, this substance can hold a huge amount of information, estimated up to one exabyte (one billion gigabytes) per cubic millimeter of DNA—for millennia. (The magnetic tape that serves as the foundation of most digital archives has a maximum life span of about 30 years, but DNA in 700,000 year fossils can still be sequenced.) But one challenge that is hindering to making this amazing technology a reality is the slow, expensive and error-prone process of creating, and synthesizing, new DNA sequences that fit a desired code.

“Synthesizing DNA is a major bottleneck with respect to recording cost, accuracy and writing speed,” says Olgica Milenkovic, a coding theorist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-senior author of a new study on the topic. She and her colleagues have suggested that instead of custom-synthesizing DNA from scratch, mark existing DNA molecules with patterns of “nicks” to encode data.