Researchers Prove Concept of Storing Big Data in DNA

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Over at Forbes, Rita Koselka writes that researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute have demonstrated the ability to store the entire Library of Congress (700 terabytes of data) in a single gram of DNA.

Church and his colleagues are not the first to store binary information in DNA, but they stored a tremendous amount and were able to read and write it using commercially available gene synthesis and sequencing machinery, in just a couple of weeks. The results, published in the journal Science, were not only astonishing but garnered interest throughout the corporate world. “Every storage and many device makers as well as the large data companies have contacted us. You would know the names,” says Church. This might not solve every big-data problem—fast access to the data is an issue—but as a solution to large-scale archival storage it could be a godsend.

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