NEO · Next Generation Molecular Data Storage

Current long-term archival media (such as tape and disk) have several issues, the most important one being that they are short lived (up to 5-10 years) forcing data to be copied between storage media every few years in a costly process which also produces considerable electronic waste. Longer-lasting media are desperately needed and DNA oligos have been identified as a major contender to be the next archival storage medium. With it, data is written using DNA synthesis and read using DNA sequencing. DNA is particularly promising as a storage medium, due to its durability as it can last for several hundreds of years. However, storing data in DNA oligos is currently too expensive due to the exorbitant cost of DNA synthesis (~0.12USD to write one bit) as well as issues such as speed in writing (synthesis) and reading (sequencing). For this reason, we propose to investigate storing data in DNA nanostructures. Our approach is based on producing DNA nanostructures, like a breadboard, and attaching streptavidin at a given set of locations, to either write a one if streptavidin is present or a zero otherwise. The major benefit of our approach is that all possible nanostructures can be built out of a predefined, small set of DNA oligos which can be produced cheaply and en-masse. Writing is therefore substantially cheaper. With our approach, writing, reading (based on atomic force microscopy), and editing are also substantially faster. Editing information is currently infeasible with DNA storage based on oligos. We have successfully demonstrated the feasibility of both writing and reading in proof-of-concept experiments, giving confidence in the approach. The goal of this proposal is to scale up the basic but successfully tested idea to make this a feasible approach at a larger scale. The team proposing this work is ideally placed to make the research a success. The team brings all the necessary expertise together.