In a paper published today in Nature Materials, a team led by University of Glasgow physicists describe how they were able to pass information from a series of tiny magnets arranged on an ultra-thin film to magnets on a second film below. This new form of magnetic interaction makes a formerly two-dimensional phenomenon three dimensional, and the discovery may lead to advances in spintronics. “It’s a bit like being given an extra note in a musical scale to play with,” said Glasgow University’s Dr. Amalio Fernández-Pacheco. “It opens up a whole new world of possibilities, not just for conventional information processing and storage, but potentially for new forms of computing we haven’t even thought of yet.”

In its first run, the $10,000 prototype converted “HELLO” into DNA. The device first encoded the bits (1’s and 0’s) into DNA sequences (A’s, C’s, T’s, G’s). It then synthesized the DNA and stored it as a liquid. Next, the stored DNA was read by a DNA sequencer. Finally, the decoding software translated the sequences back into bits. The 5-byte message took 21 hours to convert back and forth, but the researchers have already identified a way to reduce the time required by 10 to 12 hours. They’ve also suggested ways to reduce the cost by several thousand dollars.

In nucleotide form HELLO (01001000 01000101 01001100 01001100 01001111 in bits) yielded approximately 1 mg of DNA, and just 4 micrograms were retained for sequencing. As Technology Review notes, at that rate, all of the information stored in a warehouse-sized data center could fit into a few standard-size dice. Once the technique is perfected, it could store data much longer than we’re currently able to. As Microsoft points out, some DNA has held up for tens of thousands of years in mammoth tusks and the bones of early humans. That’s why Microsoft and other tech companies are eying DNA as a way to solve looming data storage problems. As previously reported, Microsoft’s formal goal is to have an operational DNA-based storage system working inside a data center by the end of this decade.

DNA storage isn’t entirely new, but the novelty here is that this system is fully automated. Before it can succeed commercially, though, the cost to synthesize DNA and extract the information is stores needs to come down. In other words, we need a way to synthesize DNA cost-efficiently. While it may sound a bit sci-fi, we could all be storing data as DNA before we know it.

To help move DNA storage from research labs to datacenters, researchers from @uwcse and Microsoft demonstrate a fully automated DNA storage system https://t.co/O5dyfikimm pic.twitter.com/xxnwIPGASW

— Microsoft Research (@MSFTResearch) March 21, 2019