Biomemory, eureKARE, and the future of DNA-as-storage
Data storage needs are vastly outpacing the storage capabilities made possible by familiar technologies like hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), and Linear Tape-Open (LTO), both in terms of the storage capacity of individual drives and the space taken up by large clusters of drives.
TechRadar Pro has reported on efforts to take data centers to the moon to resolve the physical space problem, but this still relies on existing storage technology, and raises questions about environmental waste in space.
Enter DNA storage, a means of encoding data within synthesized strands of DNA during the write process, and sequencing the DNA in order to read it. Essentially, a translation takes place between the DNA bases of A,C,G and T back into binary code.
According to recent whitepapers, the benefits are readily apparent: around 9TB of encoded DNA can fit into just 1mm^3 of space.
French start-up Biomemory believes that DNA-as-storage, which it sees as future proof technology, can’t come fast enough. It currently estimates that, by 2025, humanity will have generated 175,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data (or 175 “zettabytes”) of data.
TechRadar Pro had the opportunity to speak with Alex Mouradian, CEO of Biomemory client (and co-lead in a recent €5 million seed investment in the company) eureKARE, who gave us the lowdown on this revolutionary leap in data storage.
Research in DNA data storage is largely performed in academic labs and start-ups spun out of these labs.
These research projects are mostly funded in the US by government agencies, such as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), while funding in the EU comes from national and European grants.
In France, a recent program (PEPR MoleculArXiv) was funded to strengthen this nascent field. Microsoft and Twist Bioscience are leading an R&D effort in this area, and a handful of start-ups developing DNA data storage technologies have appeared in the last few years.
These include Catalog, Ansa Biotechnologies and Iridia in the US, and Helixworks, DNA Script, and BioSistemika in Europe.
DNA storage has thus far been developed using chemically or enzymatically synthesized oligonucleotide pools (short single-stranded DNA sequences of < 200 bases).
While this methodology validated the feasibility of DNA data storage, the dependency on petrochemistry for solvents and expensive building blocks, the environmental impact, and the high cost of production ($1000/MB) hampers their viability at scale.
Biomemory is completely turning around the current DNA synthesis paradigm which is focused on oligonucleotides (short single-stranded DNA), a purely synthetic construct restricted to research labs and the pharma industry.
