As the exponential growth of digital data outpaces the capacity of current storage technologies, alternative technologies are being explored. Synthetic DNA as a storage medium is an attractive candidate due to its theoretical information density – 10<sup>7</sup> times denser than tape – and potential durability of thousands of years. To demonstrate the viability of a DNA-based storage system, we have encoded, individually accessed, and successfully decoded 35 unique files, which include high definition video, audio, and images, totaling over 200 MB of data in more than 13 million DNA oligonucleotides. This presentation will provide a brief overview of an end-to-end DNA storage system starting from encoding bytes into DNA oligonucleotides, selectively accessing files using PCR, to decoding the sequenced oligonucleotides back into bytes. Furthermore, present challenges moving forward, including but not limited to DNA preparation and preservation, will be discussed.

End-to-end DNA archival storage system

254th National Meeting (2017)

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