
As the modern world produces ever more data, researchers are scrambling to find new ways to store it all. DNAholds promise as an extremely compact and stable storage medium, and now a new approach could let us write digital data directly into the genomes of living cells.
Efforts to repurpose nature’s built-in memory technology aren’t new, but in the last decade the approach has gained renewed interest and seen some major progress. That’s been driven by an explosion of data that shows no signs of slowing down. By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes will be created each day globally.
Storing all this data could quickly become impractical using conventional silicon technology, but DNA could hold the answer. For a start, its information density is millions of times better than conventional hard drives, with a single gram of DNA able to store up to 215 million gigabytes.
Continue reading… “New Research Could Enable Direct Data Transfer From Computers to Living Cells”