Twist Bioscience Selected as DNA Synthesis Provider for DNA Storage Project Under IARPA MIST Program

Twist Bioscience Corporation has been selected as a subcontractor to Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to undertake the DNA synthesis portion of the Molecular Information Storage (MIST) program through a contract with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

DNA has the ability to store large amounts of data over long periods of time in a very dense format, however today this storage technology is not cost efficient, nor widely available. The aim of the project, termed Scalable Molecular Archival Software and Hardware (SMASH), is to make long-term DNA storage accessible and commercially viable within the next 3 to 5 years.

“With digital data growing at an exponential rate, there is increasing interest and excitement about using nature’s storage medium, DNA, to store digital data,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder, Twist Bioscience. “With the government’s commitment to fund this exciting new area of storage, we believe that as part of this consortium of specialists, we can truly revolutionize the DNA synthesis process, and reduce the cost of synthesis for DNA storage by many orders of magnitude.“

The company may receive up to $9.15 million in fees under the multi-phase contract awarded to GTRI, which is worth up to $25 million. The deliverables under the contract for the company consist of creating a DNA synthesis platform on silicon that ‘writes,’ or synthesizes, enough DNA per day to allow the cost of storing digital data to be as low as $1/GB. This is a reduction in the cost of approximately 6 to 7 orders of magnitude from the cost of DNA storage today, by the firm’s internal estimates.

In addition to the $9.15 million earmarked for the firm, there is an additional $5.5 million slated to bolster DNA synthesis through new chip design with standard CMOS electronics that are able to write DNA using the efficiencies of current semiconductor technologies. This research will be conducted at GTRI, and will then come to Twist for commercial implementation.

The primary contract is held by the GTRI, with subcontractors the company to conduct DNA synthesis, University of Washington/Microsoft Corp. teams bringing system architecture, data analysis and coding expertise and Roswell Biotechnologies to provide a high throughout DNA data reader chip and platform.

“50 years ago, DNA storage was considered science fiction – today, it is science with a path toward broad implementation,” said Leproust. “We expect in the next 3 to 5 years, with the proper amount of government and industry investment, it will become a reality for long-term storage.“

He continued, “We see the first applications of commercial DNA storage being long-term markets where current storage is not meeting the needs of the industry. This includes enterprise, where governing bodies require that the retention of large volumes of data for a particular project like a clinical trial or airplane design be kept for decades, government bodies, which retain vast amounts of historical information, and the consumer market for large archives of photos and videos.“

Today, the company manufactures more than one million oligonucleotides on a single silicon chip sing semiconductor technology. The firm is now working toward the next gen of silicon chips that will allow the company to synthesize or write, gigabytes of DNA on each silicon chip. While the DNA Twist makes today is of quality, DNA used for digital storage can be imperfect, with computer algorithms correcting the errors efficiently.

How to store digital data in DNA
To encode digital data into DNA, first, digital files are converted from the binary code using 0s and 1s of digital data into sequences of A, C, T and G. Twist Bioscience then synthesizes short segments of DNA (approximately 200 to 300 bases or positions) in the sequence order provide and a coding efficiency of approximately 1 bit per base. Each short DNA segment contains a sort of barcode to indicate their place within the overall sequence. Specific segments of DNA can be found using this barcode to be copied or recalled as needed, eliminating the need to decode and sequence the entire file when only a small portion is needed for a particular task. The files can be recovered by an ordinary DNA sequencer due to ECC schemes used when writing the data.

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