Information Storage in DNA by Nick Goldman

The amount of information that humans produce and want to store is growing exponentially. I will argue that at present, no long-term archiving - meaning storing safely, recoverably, for long periods of time with rare access and minimal maintenance requirements - of digital information is taking place. Recent advances in genome science led us to look at the possibility of using DNA as a digital archive medium. In a ‘proof-of-principle’ experiment, we used standard DNA technologies to store and recover approximately 750kb of digital information in a manner that could be extrapolated to global data scales, incorporating modern methods such as error correcting codes for data integrity. DNA has numerous properties that are ideal for archiving, and this talk will describe our and others’ work in “DNA-storage” and will speculate on the future of DNA as a digital storage medium.