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[Microsoft] reported [July 7] that it had written roughly 200 megabytes of data, including War and Peace and 99 other literary classics, into DNA.Researchers have demonstrated that digital data can be stored in DNA before, but Microsoft says none have written so much of it into DNA at once.
DNA is a good storage medium because data can be written into molecules more densely than the basic elements of conventional storage technologies can pack it in, says Karin Strauss, Microsoft’s lead researcher on the project[.]
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Strauss says the project is motivated by the fact that electronic storage devices are not improving as quickly as the amount of data we use grows. “If you look at current projections, we can’t store all the information we want with devices at the cost that they are,” she says.
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But [Reinhard Heckel] says that the largest obstacle to making DNA data storage useful is the cost, because making custom DNA molecules is expensive…[However,] Strauss is confident that the costs…will plunge significantly in coming years.
Read full, original post: Microsoft Reports a Big Leap Forward for DNA Data Storage
