Emily Leproust, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience, spoke with MIT Technology Review about why DNA strands may be the next frontier in the emerging data storage market.
Here are six things to know about encoding data in DNA.
1. Manufactured DNA strands, also known as synthetic genes, are "the starting point of every biotech drug, food or fragrance" today, according to MIT Technology Review. Twist Bioscience, one of the largest suppliers of synthetic genes, manufactures roughly 3 million of these strands each day.
2. Ms. Leproust told MIT Technology Review capsules of DNA represent the future of data storage drives. She showed the publication a DNA capsule in the form of a "silver lozenge barely the size of a pill," which she said stores as much data as a Facebook data center.
3. Ms. Leproust's vision for data storage rests on the ability to encode data in DNA, translating information into genes. Twist Bioscience has provided 20 million custom-coded DNA strands to Microsoft Research since 2016, which the team has used to encode music videos, songs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"For archival data you want to store for a long time, there's nothing better," said Luis Ceze, PhD, a professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at Seattle-based University of Washington and collaborator on the project with Microsoft Research.
4. In February, the team of Microsoft Research and University of Washington researchers published a study in Nature Biotechnology detailing how they sequenced synthetic genes to recover individual data files from more than 200 megabytes of data encoded in DNA.
5. A commercial shift to storing data in DNA may ease concerns in the data storage market, which boasts roughly $30 billion each year. IDC predicted the world will create 163 zettabytes of digital data by 2025, which users will need to store somewhere.
6. A key barrier to the DNA storage market is cost. Twist Bioscience, a five-year-old startup, sells synthetic genes for 7 to 9 cents per DNA letter, and allows customers to store 12 megabytes of data in DNA for $100,000.
"In a few years it won't be $100,000 to store that data," Dr. Leproust said. "It will be 10 cents."