USING THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE TO STORE DATA
There is no shortage of global catastrophes to worry about these days.
The pandemic, food insecurity, the war in Ukraine, and climate change might top the list. But one impending crisis that doesn’t get as much attention is the crunch in data storage space. Simply put, the technology in recording and storing information—warehouses full of hard drives and magnetic tape—isn’t keeping pace with the massive volume of stuff we’re trying to keep. And we’re not talking about just work emails and vacation videos, but also vital records from all sectors, including healthcare, banking, investing, and government, not to mention historical archives.
To help solve this problem, researchers at Georgia Tech are looking to emulate one of nature’s most ingenious methods of compact and durable recordkeeping: DNA.
We’ve long known that DNA has evolved to contain our encoded biological information in a microscopic double-stranded package. But now scientists have discovered a way to grow 3D DNA strands on a microchip, using the four bases that make up biological DNA, that will eventually be able to hold exabytes (one billion gigabytes) of data. “You grow the DNA, and then you can wash it off into a droplet that contains volumes of information,” says Nicholas Guise, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).
Photo: GTRI senior researcher engineer Chris Shappert tests a microchip that will be used to grow DNA for archival storage
“Then you can dry it out into a spot of dehydrated DNA that can contain all of your data. That compression is what makes it so appealing. You could replace an entire data farm with a couple of racks of DNA spots.”
Guise is the director of the Scalable Molecular Archival Software and Hardware (SMASH) project, an effort spearheaded by GTRI to develop scalable, DNA-based storage methods. He says that, in addition to the sheer volume of information that DNA can store, another appeal is its longevity. “It’s more robust than
our current form of storage,” he says.
“Hard drives degrade; you have to replace them every five to 10 years. DNA can last tens of thousands of years. We’ve sequenced woolly mammoth DNA from the tundra. As long as it’s kept relatively cold and away from UV light, it exists for an incredibly long time. So while there is a high cost initially, the lifetime cost can be competitive.”
In addition to a prohibitive sticker shock, the other hurdle DNA storage faces is the speed, or lack thereof, with which DNA data can be retrieved. “DNA didn’t necessarily evolve to live in the microprocessor stage where we expect everything in a fraction of a second,” says Guise. “It can take a full day to write a strand of a couple of hundred bases—and that’s only a handful of bytes.”
As a result of the price and speed, DNA data storage is currently mostly used for archival purposes. But Guise can see a not-so-distant future in which the building blocks of life also support our need to store and access information.