Technology alliance boosts efforts to store data in DNA

Image: Adapted from Getty. Article by Sarah Vitak. Nature – March 3, 2021.

Trade group aims to advance technologies for storing big data.

The digital universe could add some 175 zettabytes of data per year by 2025, according to the market-analysis firm IDC. That’s 175 with 21 zeroes after it. That amount of information will require massive data centres and vast energy resources to maintain. A small but growing group of researchers advocates DNA as a sustainable, stable replacement.

These efforts got a lift last November, when a coalition of computing and biotech firms including Microsoft, Twist Bioscience, Illumina and Western Digital announced that they were forming the DNA Data Storage Alliance (DDSA). The alliance hopes to “organize the industry and think of how to build the whole ecosystem for DNA data storage”, says Xavier Godron, chief technology officer at DNA Script, a Paris-based developer of bench-top DNA synthesizers and a member of the alliance. […]

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