In this three year project (€3M funded by the EU), we will research all relevant aspects of DNA storage in a consortium of six partners across three countries (UK, France, Ireland) bringing together all necessary expertise. We will research all relevant technologies such as encoding different types of data in DNA, scalable DNA synthesis to store data, experimental techniques to manipulate the data, efficient sequencing and decoding approaches to read back the data as well as automation of all aspects. The final result will be an end-to-end prototype for storing data in DNA and for reading it back.

In initial work we have developed OligoArchive, an architecture for using DNA-based storage system as the archival tier of a relational database. We demonstrate that OligoArchive can be realized in practice by building archiving and recovery tools (pg_oligo_dump and pg_oligo_restore) for PostgreSQL that perform schema-aware encoding and decoding of relational data on DNA, and using these tools to archive a 12KB TPC-H database to DNA, perform in-vitro computation, and restore it back again.

Our initial results are summarised in the paper available here.

A factsheet/summary of the project can be found here.