MICROSOFT

Photo Source: MicrosoftCompany Demonstrates Automated DNA Storage
If countless procedural crime shows have taught us anything, it's that DNA can hold a veritable ton of information just waiting to be accessed by a bunch of people wearing lab coats who like to squint at pipettes. Microsoft wants to take advantage of those capabilities using synthetic DNA, and earlier this week, the company announced that it would demonstrate the first fully automated DNA data storage system in a proof of concept test.
That test sounds deceptively simple: researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington encoded the word "hello" in synthetic DNA and then converted it back to digital data with a fully automated system. Existing systems can handle important parts of that process, but as Microsoft explained in its announcement, "many of the intermediate steps until now have required manual work in the research lab." This one does not.
Automating these processes is crucial to enabling the use of synthetic DNA as a storage mechanism at scale. Microsoft said that DNA "could fit all the information currently stored in a warehouse-sized datacenter into a space roughly the size of a few board game dice." But no company's going to bother with those information-loaded says if retrieving the data they hold is a time-consuming process that relies on manual labor.
That's why the company said that "costs need to be lowered for both synthesizing DNA - essentially custom building strands with meaningful sequences - and the sequencing process that extracts the stored information" if using synthetic DNA as a storage mechanism is going to work. Because human workers are so expensive (who would have thunk?) Automating these processes will be vital to making them more affordable.

N. Mott