DNA Digital Data Storage

Not really. The offset reads given specific primers producing entirely different results, perhaps, for steganography.

The only significant thing about DNA, as applied to information storage, is just that DNA is nearly as energy efficient as physically possibly[1] for storing bits of information, and therefore, it has incredible potential to encode everything.

The issue, at least from the last time I heard George Church speak (~Fall 2016), is that the interface for DNA storage systems would have to be radically re-imagined, since we can't go between Digital <-> DNA anywhere near the order of magnitude as we can go DNA <-> DNA, or Environment -> DNA.

Something like genetically engineered bacteria that live on the walls and have special proteins that sense and encode the environment, and count the number of unique human genomes they encounter, like a time series database (think PipelineDB) may be possible.

[1] I'm pretty sure it's based off this paper, but I'm not 100% sure. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090715131447.h... Basically, the idea is that for the energy used to copy DNA, DNA polymerase is very good at only inserting the "correct" nucleotide.

If you read the metaphorical marketing data sheet, DNA can look really interesting. If you get down into what reading it actually entails, it honestly starts looking less enticing. Biology optimizes pretty heavily for constructing proteins with it and the ability to duplicate it, not generic data storage. There's a lot of details you don't learn in school about how transcription works that make it less and less appealing as a general-purpose data store the more you learn, IMHO. If nothing else, it looks more like tape storage than any sort of random access storage, which right off the bat is a pretty significant hit nowadays.

DNA mastery is important on its own terms as biology mastery, but I wouldn't be surprised there is no point in the future in which it is the optimal mechanism for storing generic data.

The other aspect is that the shelf life of DNA can be significantly longer than other mediums. I haven't personally done anything with DNA data storage, but the idea is that tape storage is good for 30-50 yrs, but we can recover intact DNA from mammoths (~10,000 yrs)