Scientists have long touted DNA’s potential as an ideal storage medium; it’s dense, easy to replicate, and stable over millennia. But in order to replace existing silicon‐chip or magnetic‐tape storage technologies, DNA will have to get a lot cheaper to predictably read, write, and package.
That’s where scientists like Hyunjun Park come in. He and the other cofounders of Catalog, an MIT DNA‐storage spinoff emerging out of stealth on Tuesday, are building a machine that will write a terabyte of data a day, using 500 trillion molecules of DNA.
If successful, DNA storage could be the answer to a uniquely 21st‐century problem: information overload. Five years ago humans had produced 4.4 zettabytes of data; that's set to explode to 160 zettabytes (each year!) by 2025. Current infrastructure can handle only a fraction of the coming data deluge, which is expected to consume all the world's microchip‐grade silicon by 2040.
“Today’s technology is already close to the physical limits of scaling,” says Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. “DNA has an information‐storage density several orders of magnitude higher than any other known storage technology.”
How dense exactly? Imagine formatting every movie ever made into DNA; it would be smaller than the size of a sugar cube. And it would last for 10,000 years.
Wired, June, 2018. Disponível em https://www.wired.com/. Adaptado.