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Alexander Lange's avatar

Amazing work, thanks for pulling it together.

Besides DNA storage in its different forms - which other alternative paths do you see at the horizon to solve the storage bottleneck?

Why would DNA be particularly well / ill suited for warm / hot storage? What are the trade offs?

Once developed, how can DNA storage be manufactured at scale, productised and integrated into modern data / compute stacks?

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Felix Neubeck's avatar

Thank you Alex, means the world to me!

First question: There are other technological approaches that are quite elegant, like spintronics, see in this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-020-0022-5.

But to answer the question if "at the horizon," then none really. Every alternative technology seems 5-10 years away at best to be somewhat commercial relevant. And it seems to me that those cases will still be niche use-cases.

Second question: Because of the I/O limitations, I don't see DNA relevant for warm/hot storage at least for the next 10-15 years, or even more. Maybe when it has overcome its sequencing and synthesizing limitations, but before that DNA will most likely take massive shares of cold storage, if at all.

Third question: Scaling DNA will require an enzyme based approach, as that is what works best in nature (fastest & most reliable). The current chemical processes are not well suited at all to scale. Speaking from a manufacturing and product stand-point, fusing enzyme based approaches with semiconductor technology seems the obvious ways to go as described in this paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi6714.

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