Digital preservation with synthetic DNA

The growing adoption of AI and data analytics in various sectors has resulted in digital preservation emerging as a cross-sectoral problem that affects everyone from data-driven enterprises to memory institutions alike. As all contemporary storage media suffer from fundamental density and durability limitations, researchers have started investigating new media that can offer high-density, long-term preservation of digital data. Synthetic Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid (DNA) is one such medium that has received a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we provide an overview of the ongoing collaboration between the European Union-funded, Future and Emerging Technologies project OligoArchive and the Danish National Archive in preserving culturally important digital data with synthetic DNA. In doing so, we highlight the challenges involved using DNA for long-term preservation, and present a holistic data storage pipeline that brings together several novel techniques (standardized file storage, motif-based DNA encoding, scalable read consensus to name a few) to provide reliable, passive, obsolescence-free digital preservation using synthetic DNA.