Researchers at the University of Washington and nearby Microsoft announced a breakthrough located at the intersection of biotech and computer architecture.
They successfully stored and retrieved 200 MB of data in synthetic DNA. That is nearly 10 times the previous record, and here's why it is a significant accomplishment, according to the University of Washington:
"One of the big advantages to DNA as a digital storage medium is its ability to store vast quantities of information, with a raw limit of one exabyte—equivalent to one billion gigabytes—per cubic millimeter. The data must be converted from digital 0s and 1s to the molecules of DNA: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. To restore the data to its digital form, the DNA is sequenced and the files decoded back to 0s and 1s. This process becomes more daunting as the amount of data increases—without the ability to perform random access, the entire dataset would have to be sequenced and decoded in bulk in order to find and retrieve specific files. In addition, the DNA synthesis and sequencing processes are error-prone, which can result in data loss."
You can read their just published paper in the journal Nature Biotechnology.