Toward practical high-capacity low-maintenance storage of digital information in synthesised DNA

摘要

The shift to digital systems for the creation, transmission and storage of information has led to increasing complexity in archiving, requiring active, ongoing maintenance of the digital media. DNA is an attractive target for information storage because of its capacity for high density information encoding, longevity under easily-achieved conditions^– and proven track record as an information bearer. Previous DNA-based information storage approaches have encoded only trivial amounts of information^– or were not amenable to scaling-up, and used no robust error-correction and lacked examination of their cost-efficiency for large-scale information archival. Here we describe a scalable method that can reliably store more information than has been handled before. We encoded computer files totalling 739 kB of hard disk storage and with an estimated Shannon information of 5.2 × 10⁶ bits into a DNA code, synthesised this DNA, sequenced it and reconstructed the original files with 100% accuracy. Theoretical analysis indicates that our DNA-storage scheme scales far beyond current global information volumes. These results demonstrate DNA-storage to be a realistic technology for large-scale digital archiving that may already be cost-effective for low access, multi-century-long archiving tasks. Within a decade, as costs fall rapidly under realistic scenarios for technological advances, it may be cost-effective for sub-50-year archival.