It’s necessary to point out that data is being generated at a rate that exceeds current storage capacity.

All these characteristics such as density, longevity, sustainability, and ease of replication, make synthetic DNA an attractive prospect for long-term data storage. It is estimated that DNA is capable of storing 1EB, which is equal to one million TB per square inch. It seems incredible that magnitudes are higher linear tape-open storage. Hypothetically, storing data this way could also keep it safe for thousands of years.

For now, DNA storage is not quite useful because of its high expense and extremely slow read and write throughput. The first nanoscale DNA storage writer was demonstrated thanks to the partnership with the University of Washington’s Molecular Information Systems Laboratory, and it is the company’s latest advance.

An electrode array and demonstrated DNA synthesis was produced by the researchers. It has electrode sizes and pitches that help the 25 million oligonucleotides per square cm be enabled.

After the demonstration, the next step was to evaluate the maximum length of DNA that could be synthesised reliably using the nanoarray. A 100-nucleotide-long DNA sequence was settled on as an example for a good length  for their demonstration.

A study has been published in a Science Advances paper. According to this research, the quality of DNA was demonstrated, and it synthesised using the  nanoarray. This was sufficient for DNA data storage by encoding a 40-byte message, which says ‘Empowering every person to store more!’.

The technology is expected to scale to billions of features per square cm, which will be capable of enabling synthesis write throughput in order to reach megabyte per second levels – approximately 1,000 times higher than previously demonstrated. This may make  DNA storage competitive with other forms of storage.

“More broadly, this work demonstrates control over the electronic-to-molecular interface, which we posit opens a door to new applications. For example, electrochemical control methods enable spatial control of enzymes at the nanoscale. Beyond DNA, this could also be a tool for drug discovery, by enabling rapid combinatorial organic synthesis as a platform for screening drug-protein binding kinetics. Other examples are a tool for assays that detect disease biomarkers or even a platform for sensing environmental pollutants.” – two of the Microsoft researchers said in a blog post.

Since synthesis happens in parallel, there is a potential to reduce the cost per DNA sequence significantly, which turns out to be an additional benefit.

• Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences was awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and Jeffery W. Kelly.
• Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was awarded to Takuro Mochizuki.
• Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to Hidetoshi Katori
• Jun Ye. Six New Horizons Prizes were awarded for Early-Career Achievements in Physics and Math.
• Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to Women Mathematicians for Early-Career Achievements.

The scientific and medical response to Covid-19 has been unprecedented, and two of this year’s prizes are for breakthroughs that played a significant role in that response. The innovative vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that have proven effective against the virus rely on decades of work by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. Convinced of the promise of mRNA therapies despite widespread skepticism, they created a technology that is not only vital in the fight against the coronavirus today, but holds vast promise for future vaccines and treatments for a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, autoimmune and genetic diseases.

Meanwhile, the almost immediate identification and characterization of the virus, rapid development of vaccines, and real-time monitoring of new genetic variants would have been impossible without the next generation sequencing technologies invented by Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer. Before their inventions, re-sequencing a full human genome could take many months and cost millions of dollars; today, it can be done within a day at the cost of around $600. This resulted in a revolution in biology, enabling the revelation of unsuspected genetic diversity with major implications from cell and microbiome biology to ecology, forensics and personalized medicine.

The struggle against neurodegenerative diseases is an ever-present emergency. Jeffery W. Kelly has made a difference in the lives of people suffering from amyloid diseases that affect the heart and nervous system. He showed the mechanism by which a protein, transthyretin, unravels and agglomerates into clusters that kill cells, tissues and ultimately patients. He then conceived a molecular approach to stabilizing the protein, and after he synthesized a thousand candidate molecules, one of the designed molecules had the right structure to achieve this stabilization. He then helped develop it into an effective drug, named tafamidis, that significantly slows the progression of these diseases. In the process, he provided evidence for the notion that protein aggregation causes neurodegeneration, which has relevance for other neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease.

Hidetoshi Katori and Jun Ye, working independently, have improved the precision of time measurement by 3 orders of magnitude. Their techniques – tabletop in scale – for using lasers to trap, cool and probe atoms, produce quantum clocks so accurate that they would lose less than a second if operated for 15 billion years. These optical lattice clocks have potential technological applications from quantum computing to using the effects of Einstein’s relativity for seismology; and in fundamental research they can be used to check theories like relativity, as well as to hunt for gravitational waves and new physics such as dark matter.

While experimentalists probe the physical world with ever-increasing precision, mathematicians explore the frontiers of mindbending abstract spaces. Takuro Mochizuki works at the interface of algebraic geometry – where solutions to systems of equations appear as geometric objects – and differential geometry – where smooth surfaces unfold in multiple complex dimensions. Mochizuki overcame immense technical and conceptual challenges to extend the boundaries of knowledge deep into new terrain, extending the understanding of objects called holonomic D-modules to include varieties with singularities – points where the equations under study no longer make sense. In the process, he has given a complete foundation to the field, solving all basic long-standing conjectures.

Beyond the main prizes, six New Horizons Prizes, each of $100,000, were distributed between 13 early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields. In addition, three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to early-career women mathematicians.

Including the New Horizons and New Frontiers prizes for early-career achievements, a total of $15.75 million is conferred this year, bringing the total amount awarded to pioneering scientists and mathematicians throughout the decade of the Prize’s existence to $276.5 million.

The scientists were light on details about how they acquired the Moderna sample. “For this work, RNAs were obtained as discards from the small portions of vaccine doses that remained in vials after immunization; such portions would have been required to be otherwise discarded and were analyzed under FDA authorization for research use,” they said.

According to Stanford scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura, this isn’t technically “reverse-engineering” a vaccine. “We didn’t reverse engineer the vaccine. We posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021,” they told Motherboard in an email. “As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies. Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility.”

“This project did not waste vaccine material or reduce in any way the number of vaccine doses available to the public,” they told Motherboard. “None of the residual ‘dregs’ that we used for this work came from vaccines that could have been otherwise administered. Think of the thin layer of milk coating a carton that had been fully used and emptied yesterday and sitting on the kitchen counter—if we sequenced that, we’d get a full picture of the cow genome even though the small quantity of milk would be of no use.”

The scientists told Motherboard they felt that their peers working at Moderna/NIH and BioNTech/Pfizer had done the world a great service and that releasing the RNA sequences will help continue to benefit humanity. “While anyone interested could data-mine and filter these sequences out later, there is a substantial economy of scale and educational value in having the sequences available ASAP and in not having to guess where they have come from,” they said.