An Irish based synbio start-up is about to produce waves in the fascinating ocean of DNA data storage with the announcement that it is going to make it available to the masses on Amazon.
This initiative was taken to preserve our legacy as a species in thousands, or even millions of years’ time, and as our current method of data storage on existing hard drives is not the option as many commercially available solid-state drives last at the most for decades.
This alternative claimed that the possibility of storing huge amounts of data on nanostructured glass in five dimensions has a lifespan of about 14bn years.
Featured on Siliconrepublic.com’s listing of 13 biotech companies with fast growth at IndieBio EU, Helixworks’ CEO, Nimesh Chandra, shared the new service on stage at IndieBio demo day in Cork.
This means that by using the new product – known as DNADrive – we can now store 512KB of data on DNA ensuring that it will, for all intents and purposes, survive for an eternity.
Looking to the future, Chandra observed a few times that DNA storage to the masses could be attained by using a handheld DNA sequencer, which is similar to the one developed by Oxford Nanosystems called the MinION.
While currently focused on the development of product for the commercial market, Helixworks wants to start working with movie studios who have expressed an interest in using DNA data storage to preserve their archives for millennia.
