Current long-term archival media (such as tape and disk) have several issues, the most important one being that they are short lived (up to 5-10 years) forcing data to be copied between storage media every few years in a costly process which also produces considerable electronic waste. Longer-lasting media are desperately needed, and DNA strands have been identified as a major contender to be the next archival storage medium. Here, data is written using DNA synthesis and read using DNA sequencing. DNA is particularly promising as a storage medium, due to its durability as it can last for several hundreds of years. However, storing data in DNA strands is currently too expensive due to the exorbitant cost of DNA synthesis (about 0.12USD to write one bit) as well as issues such as speed in writing (synthesis) and reading (sequencing). For this reason, we here investigate storing data in DNA nanostructures. Our approach is based on producing DNA nanostructures, like a breadboard, and attaching protein molecules at a given set of locations, to either write a one if the protein is present or a zero otherwise. The major benefit of our approach is that all possible nanostructures can be built out of a predefined, small set of DNA strands that can be produced cheaply and en-masse. Furthermore, editing stored information is currently infeasible with DNA storage based on strands but can be realized on DNA nanostructures using strand exchange mechanisms. With our approach, writing, reading (based on atomic force microscopy and automated image analysis), and editing are substantially faster and cheaper than standard approaches.
