“Punch Card” DNA Could Mean Cheaper High-Capacity Data Storage

April 8, 2020

(Scientific American) – In theory, this substance can hold a vast amount of information—up to one exabyte (one billion gigabytes) per cubic millimeter of DNA—for millennia. (The magnetic tape that serves as the foundation of most digital archives has a maximum life span of about 30 years, but DNA in 700,000-year-old fossils can still be sequenced.) One obstacle to making DNA data storage a reality, however, is the slow, expensive and error-prone process of creating, or synthesizing, new DNA sequences that fit a desired code.