Not all that useful for consumers. At this time, as least. The advantage of DNA is that it's fairly dense (human DNA in each nuclear is 3 billion base pairs * 2 bits per base ~= 6 Gbit of information in roughly 3 μm^3). It's less dense than the IBM method described by Problem Factory, but it has the advantage that copying DNA is a lot easier than reading and recreating the patterns made by a sheet of copper atoms.

When creating ustom DNA because a less a cumbersome process, it could be a cheap and space-effective way to do cold storage (both literally and figuratively).

Also, it'd be a quite sneaky way to transfer data. Spray some DNA on someone's jacket, go through all the security measures and afterwards, swab the jacket, clone and sequence and bob's your uncle.

From memory the base spacing on double stranded DNA is ~0.4nm. So it’s significantly dense. They’re taking about using 30 bases to encode a single symbol, so density is worse than that.

However the basic density isn’t really the factor of interest. What’s more interesting about DNA is that you don’t need to store it on a surface. So while with semiconductors, you can only really cover a 2d surface (and maybe stack a few dies for density). With DNA you can pack a lot more information into a 3 dimensional area.

I however am not particularly bullish in DNA storage. We don’t really have the read systems we’d need to make this viable (still costs ~1000USD to read the ~ 1Gigabyte human genome and > 1 day). Unless these guys have really developed something very novel, we don’t have the write systems either.

Both the read and write systems are also highly errored compared to digital storage (like error rates of 1 in 100). So their are many issues...

> still costs ~1000USD to read the ~ 1Gigabyte human genome

This piece is dropping fast though; Dante Labs will currently do it (with 30X coverage) for individuals for $500 [1]. And I believe the price for labs that do a lot of sequencing is significantly lower per-genome.

Writing is still a much bigger challenge, though. Writing something the size of the human genome is currently considered a "grand challenge" and is being tackled by HGP-Write:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_Project-Write#Human_Gen...

[1] https://us.dantelabs.com/products/whole-genome-sequencing-wg...

That’s an impressive price, do you know anyone who’s done it? I’d be interested in knowing what the experience was like.

Illumina appear to be targeting 100USD right now. I think their markup on reagents is probably at least x10...

But even that’s super expensive compared to reading data from a HD... so you have to wonder where DNA as storage is viable. Unless a vastly cheaper read method becomes available.

I don't know anyone who's done it (it's still a bit too expensive for me to give it a shot) but it appears to be a fairly standard saliva sample kit that you mail in.

Yes compared to HDD it's way too expensive to read. However tape backups are also cumbersome and time-consuming to use, but the fact that you can get extremely cheap bulk storage from them means lots of big companies still use them. So I could see it maybe being competitive there (eventually).

Wow, this is the first I'm hearing of Dante Labs. That price point for 30X WGS coverage is seriously impressive.

They are just using Illumina sequencers so they are simply taking a loss on each test.

Good point about 3D, I forgot about it. Makes sense; I remember looking at how DNA is packed within a cell in "The Machinery of Life" and thinking just how ridiculously dense it is. But with such packing, you can mostly forget about random access; it's more of a tape storage. Which makes me think - if all we need is dense sequential storage of bits, then we should be able to do better than DNA by going with some simpler substances that can be stacked in layers or wrapped around some core. It's probably gonna be more complicated than nano-sized ball of bit-carrying yarn, but we don't need to replicate all the structural features of DNA.

Not to mention that silicon storage comes with reading and writing circuits.

IBM has also demonstrated manipulating individual copper atoms on a surface and arranging them into patterns - a scale that would be much denser than organic molecules.

I am not sure how stable this setup was. Also, that technology can not be scaled up.

I have seen electron microscopy setups 10 years where you could cut individual lines on a microchip with ion-beam milling and "draw" another one with 7nm with via Gallium deposition (if I remember right). All that is impressive technology with specific applications but not good for scale up.