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You probably keep a backup of important personal files, photos, and videos on a flash drive or external hard drive. In the not-too-distant future, you might store that data in DNA instead.
French company Biomemory wants to bring personal DNA-based data storage to the public. Today, the company announced the availability of wallet-sized cards that store one kilobyte of text data each—the equivalent of a short email—using DNA as the storage medium. At $1,000 for two identical cards, the price isn’t exactly comparable to a memory stick. At least not yet.
Erfane Arwani, CEO of Biomemory, sees his firm’s offering as an experiment of sorts. “We wanted to demonstrate that our process is ready to be shown to the world,” he says.
At a time when the rate of data creation around the world will soon outpace the amount of storage space available, researchers are exploring the idea of saving information in strands of DNA. Companies like Microsoft are developing DNA storage capabilities, while other groups have successfully encoded songs, videos, TV shows, and even malware in the genetic material.
One major benefit of DNA is that it is a far denser storage medium than current electronics. The Wyss Institute at Harvard estimates that a single gram of DNA can hold around 36 million copies of the Avengers: Endgame movie. It’s also stable over time and requires less energy than the solid state drives and hard disk drives used in today’s data centers. Once information is encoded into DNA, it doesn’t require energy use until it’s retrieved using a DNA sequencer.
Biomemory is promising a minimum lifespan of 150 years—a lot longer than current digital data storage methods. Hard disk drives last about five years, while flash drives last for around 10 years.
“Computing has always been based on electronics,” Arwani says. “That’s good because it’s very fast. You can access your data in nanoseconds. However, electronics are very fragile and very difficult to maintain.”
Founded in 2021, Biomemory’s larger goal is to develop DNA storage devices that could be used in place of hard drives in data centers. Today’s data centers are sprawling buildings the size of warehouses, filled with rows upon rows of server racks. Every email sent, movie streamed, TikTok shared, or bitcoin traded puts those servers to work, accounting for around 1.5 percent of the world’s electricity consumption.
DNA is nature’s original storage system. The molecule is made up of the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—shortened to A, C, G, and T—which pair off to form a double helix. The order of these bases determines the genetic blueprint of every living organism.
To store data in DNA, a file is converted from its binary code of 0s and 1s into a series of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. On Biomemory’s website, a user can type the text message they want to store into an interface that looks something like Google Translate, which converts it into DNA code. Then, Biomemory custom-builds a DNA strand from that code, chemically synthesizing it base by base to match the desired sequence. Erwani says the company’s current process takes about eight hours to make one kilobyte’s worth of data.
The DNA is synthesized in a solution, so the next step is drying it to increase its shelf life. Taking inspiration from credit cards embedded with a microchip, which were first deployed in France in the 1980s, scientists at Biomemory designed a silver credit-card-like device with a circular chip that holds the dried DNA. To preserve the DNA, the card is sealed to prevent any oxygen from entering.
Arwani says customers will receive two identical cards—one to keep and another to test out the process of retrieving the data. To retrieve their message, customers will mail in one of the cards, which will be opened, and the dried DNA will be rehydrated and read by a sequencing machine. The sequence—made up of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts—is then emailed to the customer, who can plug that into Biomemory’s website to translate it back into the text message.
Arwani sees potential for DNA as a long-term storage option for people who want a safe, secure way to keep data of sentimental value. Nicholas Guise, chief scientist at the Cybersecurity, Information Protection & Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Lab at Georgia Tech Research Institute, says he could see customers using the cards to store information that wouldn’t change over a long period of time, such as critical passwords, the location of a safety deposit key, a beloved family recipe, or a message to a child or grandchild.
“It has to be something you care a lot about having forever but you’re not retrieving it often,” Guise says. “At a kilobyte you can't do much, but at a slightly higher scale, you can start storing family photos and home videos.”
But he says DNA storage might have the most appeal for companies and governments that need to store vast archives. “The big advantage of using DNA for data storage is how compact it is. That matters more if you’re storing a large amount of data,” Guise says.
Mark Bathe, a professor of biological engineering at MIT who studies DNA data storage, says the Biomemory cards will test the waters of consumer interest for this kind of product. He thinks the company will have some initial buyers, even at the steep initial price. “There are a lot of theories out there about whether or not DNA data storage is valuable and useful,” Bathe says. “But until you have a product like this and let people decide if they want to buy this in a free market type of way, you can’t really do that experiment.”
He thinks if people are interested, the cost will come down as DNA writing gets cheaper. “Demand then drives investment in reducing costs and increasing scale. That’s the typical arc that any technology undergoes,” Bathe says.
Arwani says the price of the cards is high in part because synthesizing DNA is still slow and expensive. The company, still a startup, is also trying to control demand while being able to fulfill orders. Biomemory is opening orders this December and plans to send its first cards in early January.
