Data Storage In DNA? Microsoft, Twist Bio Are Loading Up

In what sounds like the plot of a Hollywood science-fiction flick, software giant Microsoft Corp. cut a deal with a growing San Francisco synthetic biology company to study how DNA could archive terabytes of digital data for hundreds of years.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) — one of the world’s largest cloud computing space providers — will buy 10 million custom-made synthetic oligonucleotides, or DNA strands often used in research and genetic testing, from Twist Bioscience, the companies said Wednesday. The goal: see how much digital data can be crammed into and accurately retrieved from the human hard drive that holds the genetic code for the body’s own operating system.

The technology is years away from being commercially viable, in part because of the cost of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, the companies said. But data-storage providers are taking a closer at DNA as a dense, long-term vehicle for storing the increasing amounts of digital information churned out by computers.

By some estimates, DNA can hold one exabyte — one quintillion bytes — of data.

The cost of tapes and disks stored in data centers is much lower today than that of DNA data storage, said Twist CEO Emily Leproust. Where one gene costs about $100 today, she said, it must drop to a penny to be competitive with data center disks and tape.

But where today’s storage media degrades in the matter of a few years — roughly three to five years for disks and 10-30 years for tape — “you just make the DNA once and the data is there for a very long time,” Leproust said.

How long? Try 500 to 2,000 years.

Microsoft ran a pilot experiment last fall, Leproust said, and recovered all of the digital data it stored in Twist’s synthetic DNA. Such data is accessible using commonplace DNA sequencing technology, a more time-consuming process than at-your-fingertips retrievable from electronic and magnetic storage.

“We’re increasing the scale of our engagement with (Microsoft),” Leproust said, though she would not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Twist, whose backers have included Arch Venture Partners, Paladin Capital Group, gene sequencing technology company Illumina Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN), Foresite Capital Management, Fidelity Management and Research, the Pritzker family’s Tao Invest and Yuri Milner, has raised more than $82 million.

Archiving data in a DNA-based system has been a focus of research for the past few years. Researchers from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft and the University of Washington wrote a paper published earlier this month that highlighted exponential improvements in encoding and recovering data stored in DNA that have run parallel with dramatic drops in the cost of synthesis and sequencing.

“The volume of data hat can be synthesized today is limited mostly by the cost of synthesis and sequencing, but growth in the biotechnology industry portends orders of magnitude cost reductions and efficiency improvements,” the authors wrote.

In the paper, they say DNA storage should be the “very last level of a deep storage hierarchy” that includes hybrid silicon and biochemical systems.

“Biotechnology has benefitted tremendously from progress in silicon technology developed by the computer industry; perhaps now is the time for the computer industry to borrow back from the biotechnology industry to advance the state of the art in computer systems.”

Source: San Francisco Business Times, Ron Leuty
Photo: “You just make the DNA once and the data is there for a very long time,” said Twist Bioscience CEO Emily Leproust.