A huge and revolutionary initiative from Microsoft

Microsoft took the initiative to purchase 10 million synthetic DNA from the startup firm Twist Bioscience in order to encode digital data.

Twist Bioscience’s CEO, Emily M. Leproust mentioned “Our silicon-based DNA synthesis platform offers unmatched scale and product quality that vastly accelerates the ability to write DNA at a cost enabling data storage. We are thrilled to work with Microsoft, and University of Washington researchers, to address the growing challenge of digital data storage”.

The genetic material is extremely durable in time, since for example intact DNA sequences have been identicated even in dinosaur remains, who lived 28,000 years ago. Also, despite the small size of the DNA sequences, they can ‘pack’ huge amounts of information. Something which, according to Bioscience, means that no more than 20 grams of genetic material would be needed to store all the digital information currently available.

Image: Microsoft/University of Washington

Twist Bioscience mentioned that the DNA “hard discs” will replace today’s storage media that exists on computers and other devices. In addition, they mentioned that the main aim is to develop those “hard discs” from DNA in order to save important data for thousands of years, data that are not read very often. For example, library historical archives.

If this initiative proves to be successful, people may use it in their every day life. Nobody knows how it will be evolved. Technology in peoples’ hands is unpredictable..

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