Could someone shed the light on how useful this concept is? Aren't the data densities we're working with in modern silicon already better than what DNA storage could offer us (or at least in the same ballpark)?
When creating ustom DNA because a less a cumbersome process, it could be a cheap and space-effective way to do cold storage (both literally and figuratively).
Also, it'd be a quite sneaky way to transfer data. Spray some DNA on someone's jacket, go through all the security measures and afterwards, swab the jacket, clone and sequence and bob's your uncle.
However the basic density isn’t really the factor of interest. What’s more interesting about DNA is that you don’t need to store it on a surface. So while with semiconductors, you can only really cover a 2d surface (and maybe stack a few dies for density). With DNA you can pack a lot more information into a 3 dimensional area.
I however am not particularly bullish in DNA storage. We don’t really have the read systems we’d need to make this viable (still costs ~1000USD to read the ~ 1Gigabyte human genome and > 1 day). Unless these guys have really developed something very novel, we don’t have the write systems either.
Both the read and write systems are also highly errored compared to digital storage (like error rates of 1 in 100). So their are many issues...
This piece is dropping fast though; Dante Labs will currently do it (with 30X coverage) for individuals for $500 [1]. And I believe the price for labs that do a lot of sequencing is significantly lower per-genome.
Writing is still a much bigger challenge, though. Writing something the size of the human genome is currently considered a "grand challenge" and is being tackled by HGP-Write:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_Project-Write#Human_Gen...
[1] https://us.dantelabs.com/products/whole-genome-sequencing-wg...
Illumina appear to be targeting 100USD right now. I think their markup on reagents is probably at least x10...
But even that’s super expensive compared to reading data from a HD... so you have to wonder where DNA as storage is viable. Unless a vastly cheaper read method becomes available.
Yes compared to HDD it's way too expensive to read. However tape backups are also cumbersome and time-consuming to use, but the fact that you can get extremely cheap bulk storage from them means lots of big companies still use them. So I could see it maybe being competitive there (eventually).
IBM has also demonstrated manipulating individual copper atoms on a surface and arranging them into patterns - a scale that would be much denser than organic molecules.
I have seen electron microscopy setups 10 years where you could cut individual lines on a microchip with ion-beam milling and "draw" another one with 7nm with via Gallium deposition (if I remember right). All that is impressive technology with specific applications but not good for scale up.