MICROBE SYNTHESISED DNA FOR DNA-BASED DATA STORAGE

DNA has a huge potential for the long-term storage of large amounts of data. However, writing, editing, and reading DNA-based data is expensive and inefficient with current technologies. In the EU-funded MI-DNA project, our vision is to develop a low-cost, energy-efficient, and fast data drive that is able to write, edit, store, and retrieve DNA-based data. The data drive will be based on simple and easily available hardware components plus bacterial cells. The proposed technological solution should enable the short-, medium-, and long-term storage of DNA-based data. To achieve this vision, we will exploit bacterial genetic mechanisms that were evolutionarily optimized for billions of years, such as colour-sensitive genetic switches and DNA exchange processes. We have defined two specific objectives to achieve our goal. We aim to develop a bacteria-based cartridge (i) to write and (ii) to store DNA-based data. As a proof-of-concept, we will store large trajectory files of molecular dynamics simulations. Our consortium has six partners from four European countries. The governmental research organisation AIT is coordinating the project. The involved researchers will develop hardware components and engineered bacteria enabling DNA-based data exchange. The Technical University Munich is responsible for synthetic biology developments. The SME Eko Refugium will develop the software elements required for coding and decoding data. The SME Ribbon Biolabs has developed a unique technology to synthetise long DNA fragments and will support the development of analogous in vivo processes (>10kbp). The start-up studio Day One is responsible for the dissemination and commercial exploitation of the project results. The University of Zagreb will support the developments with biophysical tools and methods.