Is DNA the Future of Data Storage?

Could the future of data storage be DNA? It’s the original format after all, storing the information needed to build every living thing. and it has a handful of qualities that would make it perfect to store all the digital information in our world. With recent advances in DNA sequencing and DNA printing, it’s technically possible. But there are a few obstacles to overcome before this sci-fi sounding tech can become a household reality.

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Credits:
Executive Producer:
Matthew Radcliff

Producers:
Elaine Seward
Andrew Sobey
Darren Weaver

Host:
Alex Dainis

Scientific Consultants:
Mark Bathe, PhD
Karin Strauss, PhD

Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell

Reactions is a production of the American Chemical Society.
© 2022 American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.

Additional Sources:

[enihil]

I love how you actually explain the subprocesses instead of just glossing over them and making us search elsewhere to find out!

[joephalarope]

This will be the pinnacle of humanity! Your videos always make me smile, thank you)👍

[bpygkor]

This was super interesting, enjoyed watching this a lot!
Extremely well presented, thank you, Alex!

[xBris]

The biggest hurdle is the synthesis. Sequencing is getting exponentially better over time, but the synthesis barely evolved over the last decades. Chemistry is - unfortunately - not the answer here and we need more biochemical methods.

[IanGrams]

This was an excellent and timely overview as a coworker was just wondering about this topic and I had the perfect video to send them. Thanks Dr. Dainis and Reactions crew!

[KrashFries]

Imagine if we compressed the entire internet into a tiny test tube somewhere and some hacker manages to break the system by printing a swimming pool’s worth of cat pictures.

[hotshotgolfer]

Well Done. I am doing some reading on this subject this weekend. Sincerely happy I watched this presentation.

[avi]

I think there will be two competing storage solutions in the future: DNA and light storage

[universx]

Insanely good video! It's sad it has so little views...

[perryallen]

These are incredible videos! I'm so glad I stumbled upon your channel

[Haileyhamm]

I feel like she’s trying to explain how the internet works to me in 1875, and my eyes are starting to cross trying to keep up🤣

[larva]

Thanks for sharing. Any links to places we can stay on top of any developments regarding this topic?

[HMAOO]

Also, coding DNA would be a medical revolution!

[Ceelvain]

DNA data storage seems awesome. But have other molecular data storage been explored?
Nature has proven suboptimal countless times. And we do not have exactly the same requirement for data storage as life does for doing its life things (survive, replicate, fight off opponents, and so on).
Granted, with DNA, life already made some tools to deal with it, and we made quite some more in the past century. But maybe something simpler could be better? I dunno.

[vast]

That indirectly highlights how game changing the invention of the printing press was.

[anushreevirtualgaming]

I have selected this topic for my seminar report and Presentaion is goinh yo happen tommorow, If i have a ppt on this toic I will be grateful for such amzaing content u provided for u very much

[MisterBones]

If I could store the library of babel in my house, I can die happily.

[XSpImmaLion]

"Only" 20Tb? xD Holy crap!
And here I am feeling I'm way overboard with my measly 3.5Tb NAS.... well, ok, I don't have an YouTube channel to run.
Anyways, great explainer! I've heard of DNA storage before but never explained this deeply.
As tech giants are still using tape based and magnetic storage for deep storage, with a few operations going towards chip based, there will be lots of money being put into new tech like that... but it needs to strike a right mix there, which isn't going to be easy.
I think of DNA as a base framework of storage down to it's insanely low volume... we'll likely reach it first instead of any other alternative because of the entire structure already built around other applications for DNA. It might not even be the ideal way of storing computational data, but because we already have a need for reading and writing DNA anyways, we'll likely get there faster.
There is one other weird thing to note about data storage and how it's moving towards DNA though... and that is, there doesn't seem to be an intermediary between what we have now, and it. Perhaps there is some research on something that I didn't hear about, but even considering stuff that didn't quite pan out, it's not exactly midway there.
For instance, there's some holographic storage tech that was considered in the past, further advances in optical data storage like fluorescent discs and multi layer laser discs, further advances in magnetic and chip based storage... but those are all incremental, they wouldn't be a generational step. DNA storage on the other hand is a several fold leap that requires a whole ton of advances in biotech to reach a stage of good cold storage method... but there is nothing there for fast access.
It's like, I don't even need tens of petabytes on a gram of storage lasting for thousands of year... a shoebox sized Petabyte storage lasting a lifetime would fulfill the needs of the vast majority of people - but there doesn't seem to be anything there for that yet, not even theoretical, not even in early research stages. Which is a bit weird considering how much of a need there is for it, datacenters and all.

Not that I know of anyways, if anyone knows something in this line please share.

[victororozco]

When my Play Station gets DNA for memory, it will still not be enough

[MrMysticphantom]

DNA storage has one big limitation. It only has 1 usecase, and that is data archiving. It is physically impossible to have that system deal with fast enough reads that happen several times a day, let alone minutes or seconds. DNA will degrade very fast per read if you think about it. So for an application/program it would be a very bad idea. However, long term storage data that gets accessed maybe once in years, and loading the data in speeds isnt as high a priority, its an excellent idea