Microsoft has agreed to buy 10 million strands of synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience (Photo : YouTube/The Times of India)

Microsoft just bought 10 million stands of synthetic DNA from San Francisco-based biotech startup Twist Bioscience, which will be used in research to expand company's data centers. The biotech firm published a press release on April 27, Thursday, on its website, claiming Microsoft has confirmed the purchase.




DNA or Deoxyribonucleic Acid is oligonucleotide fragments connected end to end to form very long chains that can be used to store digital data. Microsoft is buying millions of these strands from Twist Bioscience to experiment with its potential and find feasibility of its long-term benefits in data storage, the biotech company announced in a press release.



"DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs," Emily M. Leproust who is founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience commented in the post. She also said that their silicon-based synthetic DNA delivers high-quality data storage method and they are "thrilled to work with Microsoft" as they take on the growing challenge of storing digital information.



The press release also shared comments from Doug Carmean, an architect at Microsoft, who pointed out that digital data is expanding at an exponential rate and they need a new longer-term solution. "The initial test phase with Twist demonstrated that we could encode and recover 100 percent of the digital data from synthetic DNA," he added.



Twist Bioscience offers silicon-based synthetic DNA which both data readable and writable. The new deal with Microsoft will also partner the University of Washington which will also contribute its researchers to tackle the issue of digital data storage.



Synthetic DNA has an amazing capacity to store the digital data in smallest space possible. A Microsoft research suggests that only 1 cubic millimeter of DNA can store an estimated 1,000,000,000TB or 1EB of information. While scientists have successfully encoded and recovered pictures from DNA strands, other data types are yet to be tested.



Based on the fact that researchers have extracted DNA in its entirety from million-year-old fossils, and ember-preserved specimens, data encoded into synthetic DNA can reliably last thousands of years. A working DNA-based digital storage would not only save space, but it will also increase its speed and shelf life.



Data centers of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook alone constitute 1.2 million Terabyte of data, according to Science Focus. This storage power comes from millions of servers covering hundreds of yards of space and using a great amount of electrical energy. If we are to replace these servers with working synthetic DNA data centers, all of the companies could fit their current data into a matchbox-sized device, with trillions of terabytes still to spare.



Microsoft recently reduced free storage space of OneDrive to 5GB, which makes more sense why the tech giant is seeking DNA strands from Twist Bioscience for storage experiments. NewsBeat Social talks more about the story in this video.





