Computer storage technology has moved from wires with magnets to hard disks to 3D stacks of memory chips. But the next storage technology might use an approach as old as life on Earth: DNA. Startup Catalog announced Friday that it’d crammed all of the text of Wikipedia’s English-language version onto the same genetic molecules our bodies use. It accomplished the feat with its first DNA writer, a machine that would fit easily in your house if you first got rid of your refrigerator, oven, and some counter space. Although it’s not likely to push aside your phone’s flash memory chips anytime soon, the company believes it’s useful already to some customers who need to archive data.
DNA strands are tiny and tricky to manage, but the biological molecules can store data other than the genes that govern how a cell becomes a pea plant or chimpanzee. The catalog uses prefabricated synthetic DNA strands that are shorter than human DNA but uses many more of them so that it can store much more data. Relying on DNA instead of the latest high-tech miniaturization might sound like a step backward. But DNA is compact, chemically stable — and given that it’s the foundation of the Earth’s biology, it’s arguably not as likely to become as obsolete as the spinning magnetized platters of hard drives or CDs that are disappearing today the way floppy drives already vanished.
Who’s in the market for this kind of storage? The Catalog has one partner to announce, the Arch Mission Foundation, which tries to store human knowledge on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system, like Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster that SpaceX launched into orbit. Beyond that, Catalog isn’t ready to say who other customers might be or if it’ll charge for its DNA writing service.”We have discussions underway with government agencies, major international science projects that generate huge amounts of test data, and major firms in oil and gas, media and entertainment, finance, and other industries,” the company said in a statement.
Based in Boston, Catalog has a device to write data that can record four megabits per second in DNA. Optimizations should triple that rate, letting people record 125 gigabytes in a single day — about as much as a higher-end phone can store. Conventional DNA sequencing products sold in the biotechnology market read the DNA data.
We think this new use case for sequencing technology will help [drive] down the cost quite a bit,” Catalog said, arguing that the computing business is a potentially much larger market. Based in Boston, Catalog has a device to write data that can record four megabits per second in DNA. Optimizations should triple that rate, letting people record 125 gigabytes in a single day — about as much as a higher-end phone can store.
Conventional DNA sequencing products sold in the biotechnology market read the DNA data. “We think this whole new use case for sequencing technology will help [drive] down the cost quite a bit,” Catalog said, arguing that the computing business is a potentially much larger market.
