Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis, today announced Microsoft Corp. will purchase ten million strands of DNA from Twist Bioscience for expanded digital data storage research. The strands of DNA will be long-chain oligonucleotides used by researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington to encode digital data at higher density. After working together for over a year, the organizations have improved storage density, thereby reducing the cost of DNA digital data storage by encoding more data per strand and increasing the throughput of DNA production.
In April 2016, Twist Bioscience announced an agreement with Microsoft to explore the storage of digital data on DNA through an initial purchase agreement of ten million strands of synthetic DNA. In July 2016, researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington reached an early, but important milestone, by storing a record 200 megabytes of data on DNA. With the early success in both encoding and decoding the data with 100 percent accuracy, the companies are now expanding their agreement to continue to increase the density of digital data storage on DNA to reduce costs.