Microsoft planning to store data in DNA

New York, May 27: Microsoft launches its data on the lines of DNA in the next few years, according to the company's computer architects. According to a report in the MIT Technology Review, Microsoft has wished a functional storage system using DNA at the end of the decade. Currently, one of the best and cheapest ways to store a lot of information in a small space is magnetic tape that is hard enough to capture information up to 30 years.
But as the data generation has reached an exploding stage, even magnetic tapes seem to be of little use. Therefore, Microsoft computer architects are considering a biological material such as DNA to be an odd choice for backing up large amounts of digital information, ScienceAlert reported on Saturday. Its ability to pack enormous amounts of data in a tiny space has been clear for more than 70 years. "While strings of nucleic acid have been used to cram information into living cells for billions of years, its role in IT data storage was demonstrated for the first time just five years ago, when a Harvard University geneticist encoded his book -- including jpg data for illustrations -- in just under 55,000 strands of DNA," the report said.
With the evolving technologies, scientists have been able to record 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) of information on a single gram of DNA. But scientists face a challenge in recording data in the form of a nucleic acid sequence. The tech giant demonstrated its DNA data storage technology last year by encoding roughly 200 megabytes of data in the form of 100 literary classics in DNA's four bases in a single process. "This process would have cost around $800,000 using materials on the open market, meaning it would need to be thousands of times cheaper to make it a competitive option," the report stated.
But the speed that stored DNA strands is slow to 400 bytes per second. This poses another challenge to the company about 100 megabytes per second. According to the ScienceAlert report, new technologies have seen the costs of gene sequences in recent years, indicating that Microsoft's decade target is realistic.