Forward-looking: Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the natural polymer making up the genetic traits of all life forms (and many viruses) known to man. Scientists have been trying to exploit DNA's unique capabilities in the digital realm for a very long time, and a new European-funded initiative is now seemingly confident it can achieve this potentially revolutionary result in just three years.
An international team of researchers led by Lithuanian company Genomika is working on a DNA-based storage system, a fully autonomous technology conceived to potentially store the world's entire digital data in a small box. Known as DNAMIC, or DNA Microfactory for Autonomous Archiving, the project, which received a €5 million grant from the European Union, hopes to achieve unprecedented efficiency in relation to how modern data centers use power to fuel our internet-based society.
First spotted by Tom's Hardware, the DNAMIC project wants to create a low-energy "microfactory" capable of offering end-to-end DNA data archiving services. This device will seemingly be ready in three years, and will provide everything a modern data system needs, including encoding and decoding, archiving, quality control, and more.
As explained by researchers at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU URI), conventional data centers are now consuming 1.5 percent of the world's electricity and emitting 200 million tons of CO2 per year just to store data. More and more data gets created every year, and AI algorithms will just exacerbate a problem in dire need of a disruptive solution.
Genomika co-founder Lukas Zemaitis said DNA would be an ideal solution for storing digital data, as it has been developed and refined over billions of years by life itself. DNA is an incredibly compact biologic molecule, providing extreme stability and reliability for long-term storage applications. The Lithuanian researchers are talking about "DNA caches," which would be particularly useful in the healthcare field as they can digitize patient data and store them for a lifetime.
DNAMIC's microfactory will seemingly be interoperable and easy to repair or modify. The DNA-based storage solution will be compliant with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model (ISO 14721), and even provide a dual-level encoding scheme for implementing effective disaster recovery strategies.
The researchers highlight how DNA storage technology has been studied for over 60 years, and they clearly are confident about their ability to develop a working system in a (very) short timeframe. The DNAMIC project will be coordinated in Lithuania but is aiming to solve a global problem, further developing a new field in scientific research: DNA Data Storage.