The information explosion is making the storage industry look to new media to meet increasing demands. Molecular storage, and specifically synthetic DNA, is a rapidly evolving technology that provides high levels of physical data density and longevity for archival storage systems. Major challenges to the adoption are the higher error rates for synthesis and sequencing, as well as the different nature of errors. Unlike traditional storage media, erroneous insertions and deletions are a common source of errors in DNA-based storage sys- tems.

DNA-based data storage systems have the potential to offer unprecedented increases in density and longevity over conventional storage mediums. Starting from the assumption that advances in synthesis and sequencing technology will soon make DNA-based storage cost competitive with conventional media, we will need ways of organizing, accessing, and manipulating the data stored in DNA to harness its full potential. There are a range of possible storage system designs. This talk will cover three systems that the speaker co-developed and prototyped at NC State / DNAli Data Technologies.

The most expensive factor in traditional archival storage is that it is not durable and, thus, over the years, it is necessary to do many migrations due to degradation and technology obsolescence. DNA reading technology, due to the immutable format of the DNA molecule, will not be obsolete, mitigating this obsolescence. However low cost DNA storage does come with some imperatives. Indeed DNA outside the cell, as with any biological molecule, will be subject to aggressive degradation factors, the main one being water.

Enabling data storage on DNA relies on advancements in semiconductor technology to make DNA synthesis cheaper, which is a must-have for this field to emerge. The talk will introduce storage people to the concept of how semiconductors are used to create DNA and how the two are tied together, as well as how the advancements in semiconductors are crucial to bringing DNA data storage costs down.

DNA Sequencing using Sequencing-by-synthesis (SBS) technology is today responsible for the majority of sequencing done worldwide. This presentation will cover the fundamentals behind SBS, the steps involved in going from a DNA sample to data, and the current state of art of sequencing platforms. The presentation will end by discussing how DNA sequencing can be applied to DNA-based data storage.

Abstract: DNA data storage is an attractive option for digital data storage because of its extreme density, durability and eternal relevance. This is especially attractive when contrasted with the exponential growth in world-wide digital data production. In this talk we will present our efforts in building an end-to-end system, from the computational component of encoding and decoding to the molecular biology component of random access, sequencing and fluidics automation.

DNA data storage will dramatically effect the way organizations think about data retention, data protection, and archival by providing capacity density and longevity several orders of magnitude beyond anything available today, while reducing requirements for both power, cooling, and fixity checks. One of challenges of any long term archival storage is being able to recover the data after possibly decades or longer. To do this, the reader must be able to bootstrap the archive, akin to how an OS is loaded after the master boot record is loaded.

The industry needs a new storage medium that is more dense, durable, sustainable, and cost effective to cope with the expected future growth of archival data. DNA, nature’s data storage medium, enters this picture at a time when synthesis and sequencing technologies for advanced medical and scientific applications are enabling the manipulation of synthetic DNA in ways previously unimagined. This session will provide and overview of why DNA data storage is compelling and what the DNA Data Storage Alliance is doing to help build an interoperable DNA Data Storage ecosystem.

Using synthetic DNA for data storage implies two complex steps of digital data processing, namely Encoding and Decoding, which are very different from what we are used to in the conventional Flash environment. Because of the intrinsic statistical behavior of the DNA storage errors (i.e. insertions, deletions, and substitutions), a simulator is required for figuring out the impact of different Encoding/Decoding strategies and algorithms on the storage capabilities of DNA.

Synthetic DNA-based data storage is a major attraction due to the possibility of storage over long periods. This technology is a solution for the current data centers, reducing energy consumption and physical storage space. Nowadays, the quantity of data generated has been growing exponentially, while the storage capacity does not keep up with the growth, caused by new technologies and globalization.