Microsoft begins testing DNA for data storage

Ars Technica : At nearly 1 zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) per gram, DNA has a significantly higher data storage density than conventional storage systems. And the molecule is extremely robust: Fragments that are thousands of years old have been sequenced. The successful encoding of binary data as DNA base pairs in 2010 opened up the potential for using the molecule for long-term data storage. Now Microsoft is purchasing 10 million strands of DNA from Twist Bioscience, a biotech startup that has developed a machine for producing custom strings of DNA. Twist has been producing DNA for biology research labs. Currently, the price is roughly $0.10 per base, but Twist hopes to reduce that cost to $0.02. Reading the data involves traditional genetic sequencing, which costs about $1000 per genome . In initial tests with Twist, Microsoft says it has succeeded in retrieving all the data that had been encoded in the DNA. The price of storage means that commercial use is still a ways off, but improvements in both creating and sequencing DNA molecules will likely lead to lower costs.