Microsoft is among the companies dabbling in DNA to store data, a sci-fi prompt that gets very exciting very quickly. A tech startup called Twist Bioscience reports that it has sold 10 million custom oligonucleotides (strings of nucleic acid polymers, i.e. DNA or RNA molecules) to Microsoft. The tech giant is sending over lines of code as A's, C's, G's, and T's —the 0's and 1's of DNA code—and Twist is building molecules to those specs.

Twist Bioscience's CEO, Emily Leproust, told IEEE that the company's making the strands "from scratch," and doesn't even know what the data says; you'd have to have the key, or sequence the genome, to read the molecules. Microsoft, in turn, is interested in long-term storage capabilities, so it's going to subject those molecules to some sort of punishment (radiation? vacuums? Hotmail?) and then try to read 'em. The ramifications for storing data for much longer than typical storage formats can, and heading off data decay, are profound.

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Obviously Twist has a vested interest in getting people amped to pursue data storage in DNA, but it's not all hype. Evolution has settled on DNA for the same reasons humans might: The stuff is incredibly durable, endlessly replicable, and fantastically compact. A gram of DNA might hold a zettabyte of data (that's the trillion gigs cited in the tweet above).

DNA storage also holds the promise of being sort of a lingua franca for any future advanced civilization on planet Earth. Kept cold, Twist says, the lifespan of stable DNA might go from the low thousands of years into the millions. The last data format we ever need could also turn out to be the first one we ever used.

Source: Twist Bioscience via Engadget.

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